Question for seo experts

Because those other 16m sites arnt optimized for that keyword, so you can take them over pretty easy.

But if they show up with quotes then it means they well not fall as easy.

There could be 16 million pages related to that term, but the ones in quotes are more relevant for the term and are your real competition. A page that is optimized specifically for a given term has a better chance of ranking for that term than a page that is related but less relevant.

Take a look at the top ten sites for the term. Do they have the term in the page title? How many links do that have to that page for that term?

There are many other competitive factors to consider such as the age of the site, the page rank, etc.

You can type in any term and Google will try to give you results (they make their money from showing ads along with those results), so you will always get results - the questions is, how close to the bottom of the barrel is Google scraping to find those results.

You may get 16 million results but 15 million are probably completely unrelated to your niche, most of the rest may contain one or more of your keywords but not actually be about that particular thing - the 1000 results are more likely to be focused enough for you to need to compete with.

So in short - the 1000 are the ones you need to focus on because most of the rest you will easily be able to beat if you focus on those keywords and including them in your on and off-page content and links.

Andy

Be very careful with some phrases that you search for in quotes. A phrase such as "online money make" returns 1,000,000 highly targeted, converting searches per month, yet only has 20,000 competition. At first sight going by the "all in quote" theory, this would be a gold mine of a keyword to target. Reverse the keywords however, and the competition is in the millions. The google keyword tool doesn't tell you how many times a phrase is searched, it tells you how many times a group of keywords are searched. So many people don't seem to understand this.

Just because the quotes don't say there's much competition for a keyword phrase doesn't mean there isn't. You may just be typing it differently. Also, words such as "and, from, to" etc are interchangable, and if you search for them in the quotes you're going to be misled as to what your true competition is.

It's a much better idea to do broad keyword searches using the allinanchor: tag to see how much competition you really have, with all possible keyword phrases containing your keyword, and match that up with an allintitle: search.