Keyword Research - Competing Results in Google

I've often said that the number of competing results quoted at the top of the results page in Google is a fictitious number.

I've just been writing an article on one of my websites with a link to where it was featured in an article in a UK Sunday newspaper last weekend.

I then decided to Google "mydomain(dot)com" - using the quotation marks, to find some of the other articles that have mentioned us.

Google told me there were 49,400 results. I scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked through to p10. I repeated that process til I reached the end. Page 14. There are actually 138 results. I repeated the search, asking google to include the omitted results. Did I get 49k? Of course not. I got 620. I think the number claimed by Google is something like 7,780% higher than were actually returned.

Then I tried it with a high competition keyword - how to lose weight fast. I didn't put the quotation marks in, I used it as a regular person would if they were searching. Google claimed 158,000,000 results.

Do you want to guess how many there were - even when I clicked to ask it to repeat the result with the omitted results included? 1000. Yes, really. 1000 results. My maths failed me at that point, but I think the number claimed is something like 15 million times higher than the actual result.

So - when you are looking in Google to see how many competing pages there are for your search term, take the time to click through. That number at the top of Google is just a random number.

(Sorry, that turned into a bit of an essay!)