654,000 competing web pages for a keyword, do I stand a chance?

Hi Johnson,

There is no exact rule, but some people use different guidlines...less than 50,000; around 10,000; no more than 100,000; etc.

The first thing you can do is to check out the pages of your competition. Are they professional? Are they targetting the keyword phrase intentionally? Are there any copies of the same site within the first several results? That may be a better way to check if you can compete.

Next, you can find what I call the "actual" number of results. This was mentioned by a Warrior (sorry can't remember who) on the old forum.

1. Go to Google.
2. In the options, set it to display 100 results per page.
3. Go back to the search box.
4. Put your term in quotes and do the search.
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
6. Click on the number 10 to go to the 10th page of results.
7. You will now see (at the top right), something like...

Results 801 - 807 of about 1,200,000 for "search term". Instead of...

Results 1 - 100 of about 1,200,000 for "search term"

The number "807" is your "actual" number of competitiors. It's not exact, but I think it gives a much better idea of how true competitors you will face.

Google says this is because...

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 807 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

All the best,
Michael

Some good tips from Michael , remember that the reality is that with any keyword you have mainly only 10 sites competing as you will need to get on page one to get serious traffic anyway.

So check out the backlinks of the top sites for your keywords and work out why they are ranked well. It could be anchor text backlinks, links from an authority domain or even simply that they have the exact keyword match in their domain.

Anything under 1m results is usually quite easy. It does depend on whether the top 10 are actually competing for the keyword (ie. everything in their site is focused on that keyword) or if it's mostly subpages.

If you find a keyword with a high search volume, lowish competition and top 10 filled with subpage links, it's your lucky day

I think you stand decent chances. Make sure you put the keyword at the start of the title. Also, make sure it is in the URL string, put it in the meta keyword tag in different variations.

Submit the site to all social bookmark sites.

It also depends on how much authority (pagerank) your overall site holds. So, if it has a good PR, etc...it should be easier to rank with more competition of course.