Most of what I have read here and other places is to place brackets or speech marks around the search term. I have also learned its best to take a look at the first 10 results and see if the sites are authority sites or not. My question is what is a good number (average) competition for a keyword when you search with the quotes? Thanks in advance, Todd
I´m trying to keep away from niches with much more than 1 Mio. results since the competition grows with the number of results. But if you´re looking for a really good tool to see how strong your competitors are I recommend you "Market Sammurai". Saves you from wasting a lot of time in overheavely niches and you can try it for free. Wish I had this from the beginning :-(
It doesn't matter it can be 100 or 10 million, but you're only competing with the results on the first page whether it be Google, Yahoo or Bing. Only about 10% of the people searching will reach page 2. http://training.seobook.com/google-ranking-value Scroll down about 1/3 of the page to see the click percentage and on the bottom it estimates only 10% reach page 2. Thus if you want any significant traffic you need to be able to beat one of your competitors on page 1. You'll need to analyze the PR, amount of backlinks, etc. Like mentioned above use the MS free trial, or TrafficTravis (free version), or if you use Firefox you can download the SeoQuake addon.
As someone has already said, the competition lies within the first SERP. Doing some careful competitor analysis will help you attain what is working and what isn't. Adwords?!
If I see a phrase match keyword (quotes) has under 10,000 results I go for it instantly. Don't forget to look at the titles in the results to see how competitive it is to rank.
This is right. On keyword competition, numbers doesn't matter. But you can also spy other competing sites to check their keywords
It depends if your trying to rank for a domain name's home page then you can go as high as 10 million competing pages, for inside blog posts pages I use Keyword Winner and works well in getting posts to 1st page using 100,000 competing pages or so.
You know I could cry now when I think of all the time I wasted trying to figure out keyword research. All those experts telling me how to do it and how once I figured it out, I'd be able to make a killing on the search engines. Only it never happened for me the way it did for them.
I'm new to SEO, and I don't understand how it can be that numbers don't matter. I understand that you want to get on the front page of Google, but in order to do so, surely you have to jump over all the competition to get there? So if you do a keyword search and it returns 100 million hits, that means you have to jump over 100 million other pages to get your site to page number one on Google. Well, from what you guys are saying, I am incorrect, so it would help me to understand if you could explain this please.
You have to determine if at least several websites on the first page are beatable. Even if there's only 100 competing websites the first ten could be really tough to beat (especially in the higher paying Adsense niches), high PR, thousands of backlinks, etc. On the other hand 10 million competing pages doesn't automatically make it harder to compete if they're not well optimized on the first page. With more competing pages it might be more likely, but not always so especially in the lower paying niches. The competing pages may give you a general idea, in fact MarketSamurai uses it as one of its filters, but once you filter out potential keywords you can go more in depth with analyzing the first 15 or so (used to be ten) listings in the SERPs.
Hi Bob, thanks for your reply - that makes sense to me. I've downloaded MarketSamurai and will continue my research.