What do you think of adding the number of total listings for each keyword/phrase? Just so i can tell how competitive it is to know how i am relatively doing. Otherwise i have to keep manually checking with google and i figured that you have access to it from the api. The info might be readily available without having to do another query. Just an idea.. I would love to see it. Thanks, Juls
I've thought about it in the past, but decided against it... It's a massive amount of data to store (for all keywords) that really does not have much use. The number of pages within a search result really isn't a gauge on how competitive a term is.
I wouldn't wholly agree with that. Some terms may have a higher percentage of webmasters that know about SEO etc., but other than that, the number of pages in the Google index for a given term tells you how many other pages your page is competing with to rank for that term. Or it this isn't a guage of competitiveness, what could be a good one?
I agree that its not a very accurate measure of how competative a phrase is but clients love it when i tell them they are ranked 1st out of 3.3 million pages. The ideal measure is the current highest Adwords or Overture bid. Shame we cant get that with the api
That makes sense. There would be a higher correlation between the current highest Adwords Bid and Competitiveness than between #of pages in index and Competitiveness
how about if we figure out a simple algo to somewhat determine how competitive a keyword is? Maybe you only store that calculated number and not all of the data that went into determining that number. There is an algo that i am sure many of you know that i came across a while ago that determined how valuable a keyword is based on how many listings there are and the value of the sites in the listings. ex. Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) or Keyword Effectiveness Rank (KER) Just to give us an idea, doesnt have to be exact. ;-) thanks