Why do 'exact phrase counts' matter?

[MarketingProInfo]

Any thoughts on this?...

Why am I 'advised' by many of the SEO gurus to target under 50k counts? (number of competitor results when an exact keyword phrase is entered).

Surely any count over say 50 counts (competitors) doesn't make any difference? - I still only need to know what the Top 10 or 20 have done to accurately compete with them, and anything over say 50 seems to me to be irrelevant?

I think what I'm saying is I don't understand the 'under 50k counts' figure, when really what matters more is the amount of relevant content, linking and page rank a domain has in the Top 10, regardless of the amounts of competitor counts there are?

I've found some good keywords with healthy search numbers and what appears relatively easy to rank for in Top 10 because of the Top 10's low back links and page ranks, YET they often have 250k counts, and up 'til now I've discounted them ...and I'm now questioning if that was good logic?

One final example - I found a keyword yesterday that had very few searches (so not worth pursuing) yet the Top 10 results were dead easy to rank for (probably because there was no-one searching for that keyword!) YET the competitor count for that keyword was 323,000! ...this got me curious as to why would such an unsearched keyword, with the ability to rank Top 10 easily, still had over 320k count? ...and it appeared that that keyword had about 3 or 4 different points of relevancy (eg one was a car model, one was a forex tool, etc). Now why did that keyword have such high competitor counts of over 320k yet had no-one searching for it?

...hence why I'm questioning the whole "pursue competitor counts under 50k" thing ??

Appreciate your thoughts?

[Andyhenry]

You'll probably find that the people ranking for those terms are just doing so as part of a well-rounded sem plan. Making your business an authority in competitive niches can mean including a lot of long-tail parts of your market. Since the search engines like relevance if the niche is very competitive, ranking for these low search terms could just be a bi-product of their comprehensive sem efforts and not direct sem for those terms alone.

Andy

[dogisland]

Originally Posted by MarketingProInfo

I've found some good keywords with healthy search numbers and what appears relatively easy to rank for in Top 10 because of the Top 10's low back links and page ranks, YET they often have 250k counts, and up 'til now I've discounted them ...and I'm now questioning if that was good logic?

Yes, I've been asking this myself. If the #1 position is a low PR page with hardly any links surely it would be easy to knock it off regardless of the competitor count.

I'm using this criteria to see if I think I can rank in the #1 spot for keywords.

1. Does anyone on the first page have a domain name with my keywords in it.
2. What's the PR of the top 3 entries.
3. how old are the top 3 entries.
4. How many backlinks does the top 3 sites have.

If I find a set of keywords that doesn't have a keyword domain on the first page then I'm pretty confident I can get on page 1, as long as the backlinks to the #1 spot are fairly low.

I have to say that I don't have a lot of experience with this, but this is where my thinking lies now.