What are the "TRUE" page results?

[timber]

Okay, this has been bugging me for a while, and I figured I might as well post in here, and see who thinks what.

When I do keyword research on a keyphrase (exact match), I will look at the first page and think, "what do we got here?".

Case in point, I did a search for:
"how to build a solar panel"

First page of results shows a total of
"3,220,000 results"

allintitle:"how to build a solar panel"
"82,500 results"

But if I jump all to the way back to the last page of results for the original phrase, in this case, page 55, I see:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 544 already displayed."

So? what's the right amount of competition here? I'm tempted to say 544, but it cant' be that low of a number, especially when it's such a well know, and well saturated niche.

Any insights?
Any feedback or reply's are, as always, appreciated.

Thanks.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by timber

Okay, this has been bugging me for a while, and I figured I might as well post in here, and see who thinks what.

When I do keyword research on a keyphrase (exact match), I will look at the first page and think, "what do we got here?".

Case in point, I did a search for:
"how to build a solar panel"

First page of results shows a total of
"3,220,000 results"

Hi timber,

Actually, the first page of results shows a total of 10 (unless you change your default settings), but I assume you are referring to the about X results. The about x results is just an estimate using a probability calculation based on a small sample set. It isn't actual data, just an educated guess.

Originally Posted by timber

allintitle:"how to build a solar panel"
"82,500 results"

But if I jump all to the way back to the last page of results for the original phrase, in this case, page 55, I see:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 544 already displayed."

So? what's the right amount of competition here? I'm tempted to say 544, but it cant' be that low of a number, especially when it's such a well know, and well saturated niche.

Any insights?
Any feedback or reply's are, as always, appreciated.

Thanks.

The "right amount of competition"? You are trying for the first page of results, right?

I don't mean to sound flippant, but the right number is 10. There are only 10 competing web pages on the 1st page of results. You need to compete with those 10 listings as there isn't much traffic from lower listing positions.

You seem to be concerned about getting a correct number for a metric that isn't all that important. At best it can give you a general idea about the size of the field of competition, but absolutely nothing about the strength of competition, and even less about the only competition that matters, which is the strength of the competitors listed on the 1st page of the SERP.

In the final analysis, it isn't going to matter if there are 544 competing pages, or 500 million. You must compete with the top 10 listings if you ever want to see any significant traffic. What is important is how strong are the 10 listings on the 1st page of SERP. None of the other listings, regardless of how many, are important.

Having said that, the allintitle isn't going to give you an accurate view of your competition. It is often the case that one or more top 10 listings will not have the keyword in the page title. The allintitle: operator may not even include some of the top 10 listings, so you really couldn't consider that a representation of your competition, just a specific subset of your competition.

[packerfan]

Don't waste your time looking at the total number of pages for a keyword phrase. The only thing that matters are the results on the first page.

If anyone tells you otherwise, they have no idea what they're talking about and they're just trying to sell you something.

Download the free version of traffic travis. You can evaluate the competition using the "SEO Analysis" module. I find it's a quick and easy way to see if the first 10 results are optimized for my keyword, and how many links they have.