In this article, Chris Lee, author of groundbreaking SEO Software, Search Engine Wizard, explains the technique they use for uncovering your real Google competition.
How many times have you looked on Google and been deflated when you research your niche and see something like “63 572 129 competing pages” for your chosen keyword phrase…?
You’re scratching your head wondering how on earth you can possibly even begin to start planning your site and very often it’s enough to put anyone off for good.
Well, the good news is that you’re overlooking something fundamental here — and now I’m going to show you what it is.
Let’s take a popular keyword term on Google, broad matched, like iPod review.
Now, as I do this, I get a total competing pages count of 125,000,000 results — a lot of competition there, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Now, let’s try the same search with phrase matching “iPod review”. On this search I am getting 73 100 competing page results. Still, a lot of competition.
But hang in now, because this is where it gets interesting.
You see, one would have thought that your REAL competition are those people who know their SEO and one of the most basic things they would have thought of, would have been to include the phrase “iPod review” in their page title.
So, let’s modify our search and do an allintitle: “ipod review” search — this will reveal those pages that have the specific phrase “IPod review” in their title tag. This now narrows it down to 24 600 results.
OK, 24 600 results is a lot less than 125 million but still a lot. But, I’m not done yet – this is the part that gets even more interesting.
Now, to save time, click on the advanced search link at the top of the Google results page and select the results to return as 100 per page, rather than the default 10.
Repeat your allintitle: “iPod review” search and it will show you 24 600 results, just as before. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the last available page to view, in this case at time of searching, Page 7.
Open up that page of results and in actual fact page 5 (not 7) opens and scroll down to the end, where this message appears:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 462 already displayed.
So, Google has looked at all the competing allintitle results and decided that out of those 24 600, only 462 are pages that Google thinks are really relevant.
This means, starting from 125 million pages, Google is now sharing with you that it actually thinks only 462 are really relevant competition. We see this as highly relevant to your research and have actually programmed the latest Search Engine Wizard SEO Software release to do this competition analysis for you.
You’ll find that when you run this analysis for niched, long-tail phrases that in actual fact you may not have much competition at all.