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MYTH-BUSTER: Google Total Results is NOT "Competition" For A Keyword

by digitalproductreporter
5 replies
There is huge myth imho about "competition" for a certain keyword. This post should get rid of that myth for many of you.

Google Total Results is NOT "Competition"

If the top 20 for a search term are giant sites like cnet,cnn,msn,engadget,etc then you will almost NEVER rank better than them.

Because that sentence is true, it will never matter if there are 1,000,000 results in your competition or if there are 50 results, you will not rank and the total results tells you NOTHING about the competition for the keyword.

Competition is not found by counting total results, that is goofy

That is common sense.

Let's use an analogy, just because millions of people try to play golf every year do you think tiger woods considers millions of people his competition? doubtful. He only considers his competition the top players.

That's how you determine competition for a niche, identify how many other top players there are, and it has a name.

Get ready for it, cause not only will this post debunk the old myth, it will tell you the real way to gauge competition:

The Quality Break

In the search results there is usually a quality break. It's where the results turn from good strong sites with relevant information to, well, kinda junky.

Where the Qaulity break is, THAT is where your competition is.

If you have a keyword and 100% of the results are junk, classifieds, random results, then it doesn't matter if there are 30,000 junky results, you can rank #1 EASILY for this term.

If you have a keyword that the first 15 results are really good authority sites then you can rank easily for spot #16 but will have a tough time beyond that.

and on and on.

It will never matter how many total results there are for a keyword, if you want to rank top 20 then the only way to determine competition for a keyword is to determine how strong the top 20 sites are.

No go take any keyword tool or equation that uses total results and delete it from your hard drive
#competition #google #keyword #mythbuster #results #total
  • Profile picture of the author blase40
    Great post. I agree 100%.
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    • Profile picture of the author Stephen Crooks
      There is a lot of truth in what you say. I think however you have to widen out the argument about competition from trying to rank for a keyword to assessing the competitivenes of a market as a whole. In other words, trying to rank for a bunch of long tail keywords related to your market.

      If I had a website geared up for selling a car cleaning kit what would be a better keyword for me to target in google, "car" or "car cleaning kit"? The beauty of this is that the big guys can have their places at the top of google for broad and highly searched keywords as far as I am concerned, I want the long tails.

      Going back to the main point of your argument, it is pointless trying to rank for keywords lower than the first page of google and as such the amount of competition does become insignificant below 10. However, I do consider that the amount of competition for a keyword is a good indicator of how well served that keyword is by actual content out there. If you can find a high searched keyword phrase which you can monetize and with little competition, it's going to be a great topic for content.
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  • Profile picture of the author Marian Berghes
    You do have a point here, but let me tell you that it is NOT extremely hard to out-rank sites like cnet etc...

    I've had articles that where higher then ask.com and amazon.com, I've had an youtube video with a software review that ranked higher than the review of the software from cnet.
    And I am also pretty sure that there are alot more ppl here that had similar results like mine.

    A good strategy that I use is actually revers engineer that respective page and see where the keywords are...how often, the general content etc.. With a good optimized page and some backlinking strategy you can out-rank them.

    I agree that it is harder to out-rank websites like cnet and the lot, but not impossbile.
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  • Profile picture of the author James Schramko
    You can outrank most big sites as long as you are not talking about one word keywords (like golf) or very very sought after words.

    Two, three, four or more keyword phrases - bring it on.

    I do like your point though about comparing the competition. This is the philosophy that Axandra use with IBP. It works by comparing the top ten sites and looking for patterns.
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  • Profile picture of the author bgmacaw
    Originally Posted by digitalproductreporter View Post

    If the top 20 for a search term are giant sites like cnet,cnn,msn,engadget,etc then you will almost NEVER rank better than them.
    This depends on the search term. You can outrank these sites if they don't have authority on the keyword itself but only 'trickle down' authority from the domain as a whole. If the page has anchored links on the specific term though, you're hosed.
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