How Many SE Results Is Too Many?

[Long Beach Nathan]

Hey, I've been analyzing some page 1 competition, and I've seen some keywords where what's on page 1 actually looks like I might be able to compete against it, except for the fact that it has several million results. I've read over and over that you need to target keywords that have a much lower number of results, numbers like 200,000. I'm wondering if this might not always be true. Isn't the main drawback of competing with more results just the fact that it will take longer to get to page 1, and that you'll need more backlinks? In your own experience, if page 1 looks like it's easy pickin's, do you go for it even if there's say, 1 or 2 million results?

[conceptmarketing]

It really depends on how many of the websites showing in the results are targeting the exact term. If you put your keyword search in quotations that will give you a better idea of how many others you will really need to beat out. Also important to note that you are not competing against millions but only the top 10 as results on page 2 + are low value anyway.

My keywords which show 38,000,000 without quotes and a much more modest 94,400 with quotes on

[Long Beach Nathan]

But here's the thing. Since a regular search on a keyword returns all those results, both from the exact set of keywords, and from keywords in various areas, then doesn't that really mean that those sites are all ultimately your competition? I guess there's somewhat of a debate about this.

[Inari]

I dont really care about how many results a search shows. probably for thousands of terms where we are #1 or on the first page, there are 10.000.000+ results. so what. your competition is the top 10 guys on the first page. if you can beat them onpage and offpage, that's all you need.

[Long Beach Nathan]

Ok, thanks. I did notice though in a video tutorial for Market Samurai (of which I'm testing the demo) that he set the "SeoComp" numbers to max out at 30,000. I believe that was for exact match. I still have a feeling though that it does mostly come down to the top ten like you said. Maybe the competition just increases the time it takes to get to that first page if you're headed there anyway.

[ShaneBoyd]

Something that I've used for quite a while is targeting a niche that has less than 100,000 pages when you put your keyword in quotation marks. That just lets me know that I can rank for the keyword pretty easy. As for the over all number. Who cares? I'm on the 1st page of Google where the search has over 80 million pages. And I beat them out with only about 30 backlinks.

Good luck.

Shane

[n_touch]

You have to remember that you are not going against those million pages. There may be some sites that are being pulled up on page 2 and 3 that are there just because they are somewhat close to what you are looking for. If you are using MS as a reference you will get a good view of the comp. The other thing that you can do is get a program like IPB so that you can add the sites you want to add to get the information. With that you can check those that are on the 2nd page and see how deep the conversation really goes. Make sure that you are using allintitle:"keyword"; allinurl:"keyword" and that wil help you get a look as well. Good Luck.

[Long Beach Nathan]

Thanks. MS actually has a feature in the seo competition section that does allow you to add custom urls, which does come in handy sometimes. Do you mean to add the keyword with quotes into MS itself or just Google?

[imdomination]

I don't actually pay much attention to the indexed pages at all in MS when I'm looking at keywords. A lot of the times those spots belong to wikipedia or amazon, which are generally pretty easy to get on top of. BLP is the most important stat in MS.

[Long Beach Nathan]

Thanks, imdomination. And ShaneBoyd, I missed your post before, thanks for the tip. That's pretty cool that you're able to beat all those sites without a ridiculous number of backlinks.