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Real competition?

by InternetMarketingNoob
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello everyone

Last few days I did a lot of reading about keyword research and I found some interesting stuff about how to check your competition. Lets say you have the keyword 'fish food'. If you check that keyword with google it says it has about 104,000,000 results. Thats really a lot. But lets go to the last page of the search results (page 81). There it says:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 805 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
So it has 805 competitors? But what should I believe right now? This or the 104,000,000 one?

Isn't it better to look at the strength of the competition, like how many backlinks, and the pagerank.

Thanks I hope someone can give me some good tips because I don't know what to believe anymore.
IMNoob
#competition #real
  • Profile picture of the author ShaneRQR
    That's a good question. And the number one most important answer to it is: Competition is not defined by number of competitors but by the strength of those competitors.

    This is basically a universal rule. Think about it: Would you rather, in your car, on a racetrack, compete against 200 people on kids' tricycles or against 5 professional F1 drivers in their F1 cars?
    See how the number of competitors has absolutely nothing to do with your chances of winning?

    So forget about the number of sites listed in the results. Look at the ranking factors for the top ten sites to determine competition strength.
    Are the pages optimized for that particular keyword?
    Are they sitting on aged, authoritative domains?
    Are there many backlinks to those pages?
    etc.
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    • Profile picture of the author warrior495
      Originally Posted by ShaneRQR View Post

      That's a good question. And the number one most important answer to it is: Competition is not defined by number of competitors but by the strength of those competitors.

      This is basically a universal rule. Think about it: Would you rather, in your car, on a racetrack, compete against 200 people on kids' tricycles or against 5 professional F1 drivers in their F1 cars?
      See how the number of competitors has absolutely nothing to do with your chances of winning?

      So forget about the number of sites listed in the results. Look at the ranking factors for the top ten sites to determine competition strength.
      Are the pages optimized for that particular keyword?
      Are they sitting on aged, authoritative domains?
      Are there many backlinks to those pages?
      etc.
      great analogy with the race cars and such I couldn't have put it better myself.
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    • Profile picture of the author Matt Helphrey
      Originally Posted by ShaneRQR View Post

      That's a good question. And the number one most important answer to it is: Competition is not defined by number of competitors but by the strength of those competitors.

      This is basically a universal rule. Think about it: Would you rather, in your car, on a racetrack, compete against 200 people on kids' tricycles or against 5 professional F1 drivers in their F1 cars?
      See how the number of competitors has absolutely nothing to do with your chances of winning?

      So forget about the number of sites listed in the results. Look at the ranking factors for the top ten sites to determine competition strength.
      Are the pages optimized for that particular keyword?
      Are they sitting on aged, authoritative domains?
      Are there many backlinks to those pages?
      etc.
      Yeah, I agree. Don't focus on the number of competitors, rather the strength of the competition instead.

      Take the top 5 and plug their websites into Yahoo site explorer to see the amount of back links and where those back links are coming from. This will give you a better idea of how much work you are going to have to do to take over one of those spots.
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  • Profile picture of the author sonamlama
    Originally Posted by InternetMarketingNoob View Post

    Last few days I did a lot of reading about keyword research and I found some interesting stuff about how to check your competition. Lets say you have the keyword 'fish food'. If you check that keyword with google it says it has about 104,000,000 results. Thats really a lot...

    So it has 805 competitors? But what should I believe right now? This or the 104,000,000 one?
    When doing keyword research the simplest way is to take your keyword and put it in quotes (""). So in this case you would type this into google: "fish food".

    Then you look at the results to see your competition. Currently, I don't see 104,000,000 results for the keyword, "fish food". Google says, "1,970,000 results".

    This amount of results would be a very large number of people to compete against and hard keyword to rank for.

    That's why what I do is search for keywords less than "40,000" in competition and higher than "3,000" results to allow me to have a much greater chance of ranking for my chosen keyword and get a ton of traffic from.

    Hope this helps.

    Sonam
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  • Profile picture of the author jasonmorgan
    So it has 805 competitors? But what should I believe right now? This or the 104,000,000 one?
    Look at it like this...

    Google may have found 104,000,000 pages that mention the words 'fish food' but only feels that 805 of those pages are actually relevant to a search for 'fish food'

    So, starting off at square one, you only have 805 pages that your new site has to worry about unless you site is junk and you're lumped in with the other 104,000,000 irrelevant pages.

    This is why when people throw around stuff like I'm #1 out of 104,000,000... they are full of it. You are either 1 - 1000 or thrown into the supplemental irrelevant results.
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  • Profile picture of the author FrankBowman
    Your only real competition are the sites on page 1. Being on page 2 or under does you no good.

    Analyze the sites on page 1 for your keyword, mainly whether or not the sites:

    • Have the keyword in their title
    • If its an inner page which can be easier to out rank
    • How many links they have
    • Domain Age
    Also run allintitle and all inanchor searches for your keyword.

    I prefer Allinanchor since it shows how many SEOers are trying to backlink and rank for that keyword. Anything under 150,000 should be rankable with some work.

    Happy New Year
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  • Profile picture of the author deloriagod
    The way I look at it is if there are 200,000,000 people competing for a keyword then I'll subtract 10. That leaves 199,999,990 people that I don't care one bit about and 10 people who need their on page and off page SEO analyzed so I know what I'm up against.
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