SERPS - True number of results?

Hey everyone.

When doing KW research in Google, sometimes my "in quotes" search apparently yields more results than the broad search, or less but still a huge number.

Example:
diy holiday decorations - broad - 3 million
"diy holiday decorations" - in quotes - 170,000

Further investigation on the "in quotes" SERPs reveals that the listings stop after say 100 or 200 results.

I'm wondering, is there a quicker way to find where the results end?

More importantly, do you see this as a sign of poor competition? Surely if only 176 results are being displayed, there is a better chance of getting ranked, assuming one creates some useful, original content.

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

 

If you are just trying to find an approx number of search results for keywords, there are tools that can help you with that. I think Marketing Samurai is one, but I'm not positive. Personally, I don't look at that as an important aspect of keyword research. There are a few things to keep in mind regarding the number of search results and how competitive a keyword is.

1. Most keywords have tens of thousands, if not millions of results. I'm not sure how much it matters if you are competing again 170K pages or 1 million. That's a lot of pages.
2. Most of the results are low quality, repetitions of the same site, or completely irrelevant. So, it's not really a good judge of how much competition there is.
3. Ranking anywhere past 20 or 30 is pretty useless. So, that's your real competition. So, if the top 30 results are pretty authoritative pages, it's still going to be hard to get any traffic from the keyword whether there are 500 other results or 5 million.

I'd recommend focusing on looking at authority of the top 20 or so results rather than the total number of results.