Why should I care about SEOC?

[latearrival]

Hi guys

I'm very new to this game, and I'm hoping some of you pros can put me straight...

The Market Samurai (MS) guys, and many others on the web, talk about choosing keywords that have less than x thousand competing sites, e.g. MS say 100,000, others say 30K or 200K.

But I just don't get it! Why should I care about anything other than the strength of the competition for the top 10 places?

Last night I found a keyword that had only 30k competing sites but that had strong competition for the top 10. At the same time I found a keyword that 2.7 million competing sites but that had weak sites in the 2 to 10 spots.

1. Am I missing something here?

2. If I'm right in ignoring the number of competing sites and just focusing on the strength of the top 10, is Google's Adwords Keyword Tool a good way to quickly assess the true strength of competition for multiple key phrases at once? (Using MS, I can only check the strength of the competition for the top 10 spots on Google one keyword at a time). If not what is the best way to do it?

Cheers!

[Chucky]

Originally Posted by latearrival

Hi guys

But I just don't get it! Why should I care about anything other than the strength of the competition for the top 10 places?

Cheers!

You're kinda right there

Those are not necessarily competing pages/sites. Those are the total number of pages that have that particular "phrase" at least once.

Let's say your target phrase is 'Amazon Kindle' but you will find all kinds of blogs and websites relevant and irrelevant to the Kindle mentioning this phrase on their sites. A person running a weight loss blog may say "You can read Dr. Oz's ebook on the Amazon Kindle" etc. etc. However, this site is not competing to rank for that phrase. So it's not a competitor of yours. So you got that part right. This is where Micro Niche Finder's SOC or a plain allintitle:amazon kindle search (also allinurl etc.) on Google is superior to looking at just the 'phrase competition'. Those are better indications of 'competition' and/or pages trying to optimize for that particular kw.

But looking at the top 10 may not be sufficient sometimes. What if all top 50 for example are extremely competitive and extremely optimized?

If you are just starting out, it's best you pick a low competition keyword even if it means low traffic. Once you learn how to rank a low competition kw and build some confidence, then you can go ahead and conquer more competitive keywords.

However, if you are confident and will stop at nothing kind of guy, there's absolutely nothing wrong going behind a high competitive kw.

Hope I answered your question! Good luck!
Chucky

[latearrival]

Thank you for taking the time to reply to me Chucky. Much appreciated.

Given that I *am* just starting out and that I *do* only want to target keywords that have relatively week competition in the top 10, is Google's keyword tool a reasonable method to do a quick and dirty comparison of the strength of competition for a whole bunch of keywords at the same time?

I'd like to be able to see number of searchs and strength of competition for a heap of keywords all at once if I can (rather than typing in allinurl/allintitle searches, one for each of 100 keywords I'm considering).

Thank you!

[Andrewsmith]

I went through such a situation once when the competition was less for a particular keyword but still I observed no improvement in the ranking. Reason although competition was less but the strength of competitors was tremendous and therefore result was not to my liking.

[ebrg]

A disadvantage of assessing competition by looking at the top 10 sites is that it is kind of subjective, where as the number of sites returned by a Google allintitle search is objective.

[Fraggler]

Originally Posted by Chucky

But looking at the top 10 may not be sufficient sometimes. What if all top 50 for example are extremely competitive and extremely optimized?

The 10 toughest sites should be on the front page. If you can beat them then you shuold be able to beat everyone behind them as well.

Originally Posted by latearrival

But I just don't get it! Why should I care about anything other than the strength of the competition for the top 10 places?

For someone starting out you are already thinking ahead of the crowd. You are right - you should be focusing on the competition of the top 10. As was mentioned above, searching for your keyword in Google just returns the results that Google thinks is relevant. That relevancy could be low to high but it isn't 0.

A page can be returned for mentioning the term once or sometimes even seemingly indirect reasons. That doesn't make them a competitor worth worrying about though.

Originally Posted by latearrival

2. If I'm right in ignoring the number of competing sites and just focusing on the strength of the top 10, is Google's Adwords Keyword Tool a good way to quickly assess the true strength of competition for multiple key phrases at once? (Using MS, I can only check the strength of the competition for the top 10 spots on Google one keyword at a time). If not what is the best way to do it?

How to measure competition? First thing I would do is forget about SEOC or any other metric that isn't completely transparent or mentions the number of competiting pages. They are just used because they make it easier to teach newbies about SEO, despite it being misleading. It makes their software appear idiot proof.

An easy way to measure the competition is to look at the PR and the backlinks of the top 10 sites. The backlinks is the best measure, but you can't just always look at the number return. You need to learn how to reverse engineer the backlinks so you can see which ones are good, which ones are ok, and which ones are worthless.

SEOQuake, SEO Spy Glass, and Traffic Travis can let you do this for free. MS is good for a paid solution, but it seems to struggle with the backlinks analysis lately.

You also need to pay attention to authority sites that seems to get a boost for doing near nothing. This doesn't make them unbeatable though, but it can indicate a keyword that no one is really trying for.

Here is a link to a PDF I wrote a while ago that's still relevant. It should help you pick out some super easy keywords to get started. You can then go for tougher keywords as you realise your skillset and what you can achieve. http://plyplemadesign.com.au/blog/seocanalysis