Hi guys. I am building a new website so I've been doing some keyword research lately and now I want to see my competition. Let's say my keyword phrase is: "corporate gift ideas". I used Overture keyword selector tool and found that there are approx 170 searches per day for this phrase. If I enter these words in google.com without the quotes I get 37,500,000 results, but if I use the quotes and look for the exact phrase there are only 240,000 results. Which results should I take into consideration: with or without the quotes?
If you want to know the true level of comp. then type this in: allintitle:"corporate gift ideas" This will show you all the sites that really are targeting that keyword.
Thanks for the tip. I did the search you told me about and I found that the site "redenvelope.com" is #1. When I did a regular search, without quotes I found that the same site was #7. This means that positions 1-6 didn't contain the keyword "corporate gift ideas" in the title. How can this be, is it because of the pagerank difference?
Page rank is not a factor in this case. In order to pass these guys up you are going to need to heavy links pointing to your site. What I mean by that is you are going to have to get links from high quality website that have good pr. You might need about 2,000 very strong backlinks in order for this to happen as well as having your site optimizied correctly. Your best bet is hire someone for the job, this field is pretty tough. I may be able to help but you may not like the cost.
Thanks banless. Your advice is valuable to me. If I were looking to beat those top results I would have had a strong budget, but I just want to do a couple of experiments.. and maybe learn something along the way.