Competition in Quotations for Ranking in the Top Ten?

I think the quality of competition is more important than the quantity of it. It doesn't matter if you're up against a million other pages for a keyword if they're all untargeted and have few links pointing at them. On the other hand, if you're thinking about going for a keyword that google only returns 5'000 results for, but they're all targeted pages with quality links pointing at them, then you might want to forget about it.

I would say this reply pretty much sums it all up,
only that "keyword" competition I choose is below 5000, that's about it..

Igor

Hi Pete,

There are people who do search using "keyword". Those who are more savvy in searching Google do use that.

This search query "keyword" for example for the word "dog training guide" pulls out results that contains the word "dog training guide". These content contains "dog training guide" in them.

As opposed to the casual surfer who types dog training guide, Google will pull out all kinds of results that contains the words, dog, training, guide which may not be necessarily relevant.

That is why there is a place for "keyword" which throws out more relevant results.

From a SERP point of view, Allintitle:Keyword is even tighter in checking the level of competition. Only folks who know SEO knows that there is a need to target the keyword in title. So these are the real folks who are your competitors, not those who casually mention dog training guide in their content and end up in the "dog training guide" search results.

Another key note is the PR of the first page results. If all of them are PR 4 or 5, the challenge of ranking within top 10 is great and overwhelming. But if you see many Web 2.0 pages like EzineArticles, Squidoo, blah blah blah or low PR pages, you know that with some backlinking, you can kick them out.

There is no hard and fast rule. It depends upon the strength of your competition. In some niches, there's lots of competition, but the majority aren't optimized and don't have a lot of backlinks, allowing you to easily beat large numbers. In other niches, it can be tough against smaller numbers.

As well as the above reply to your post it also if you use quotations shows you who's site is actually optimized for that keyword.

Those pages showing up in the search results only when doing searches without quotes are going to be easy to pass up in most cases if you get backlinks using the keyword as anchor text. Your on-page SEO alone won't do it in a lot of cases - if the keyword is competitive. You'll need on-page SEO and good backlinks with the right anchor text.

Now, those sites that show up when you do a search with quotes and without quotes are your real competition. It'll probably be 7-8 of the same sites showing up in both searches. What does that tell you? It tells me that Google values sites that do on-page and off-page SEO. So that's what you want to do, too.

The sites showing up when you do a search without quotes but not when you do it with quotes usually just happened to have the individual words in your search term on their page a lot; and/or they have lots of backlinks that include one or more of the words in that phrase as anchor text. But what they haven't done is optimize for that exact phrase, which is something you WILL be doing. That's why you will pass them up once your backlinks start to build up. Your page and your links will all tell Google to value your page higher than those others.

John

Not any websites that I know of, but many people use either Market Samurai or Micro Niche Finder. Both are paid tools that greatly assist with keyword / niche research.

You search in quotes to see how many pages are optimized for a certain keyword. So you see how many are there and how much making a very relevant page for that keyword will increase your chances.
If you have a page for a certain keyword and you keep making backlinks it starts to rank on less relevant, but still related, keywords also. If a large part of the first page listings is made of sites that are only there because of their amount of backlinks, you can get there by making a very relevant content and not too much backlinks. That´s why you often see low PR pages outranking high PR pages.

I you search in quotes you only see the pages with the keyword in them. In their title or in their content. The more pages that have this keyword in their title the lesser your chance outrankink them.
An example: If you search for "Atkins Diet" you see search page after search page with webpages that are optimized for Atkins Diet and have Atkins Diet as their title. So if there are 10000 or 100000 competitors it will be very difficult to get on the first page.
Another example where you may have a chance: The keyword is "weight loss diet". Let´s assume only the first page on no.1 has weight loss diet (as a whole) as her title. The next ones have something like: Easy Weight Loss-Diet for everyone, or: Weight Loss: What´s the best Diet?. Google will show all these sites in phrase match. So if you make a page with "weight loss diet (as a whole) as the page title, it may be easy to outrank most of the other pages (much less backlinks needed), because you are more relevant.

If you are talking about choosing a niche, then I don't think the quotes do anything for you. If you're choosing a longtail keyword, then checking how many results there are when searched in quotes is part of the equation.