The Myth Of Ten Million Competing Pages
If you’ve ever shopped for books about search engine optimization, you’ve probably been confronted with proof of the author’s prowess. Number one rankings on major search engine for phrases you probably could never have thought of. So there you have it. Hard won victory against millions, or perhaps tens of millions of competing pages. That shows the authors have considerable skill. Or does it?
One common misconception is that the number of results listed for a phrase is a good measure of how competitive that phrase is. This misconception has been abused for years by authors of SEO books and by SEO firms alike. Many of these folks seem to be engaged in misleading advertising. In other cases, these “SEO experts” may know so little that they actually believe their claims.
What do you do to tell how competitive a phrase is? There a three quick techniques for estimating this.
1. Can the search engine spiders find the exact target phrase on any sites? Just put the phrase in quotes and do a search. If there are less than 3,000 exact matches, there probably isn’t much competition.
2. Check the PageRank of the top pages. If there are pages with a PR of 0 on the first page of results, there probably isn’t much competition.
3. Check the bids for the phrase at Overture.com. If no one is bidding on a phrase, it probably isn’t too competitive in the organic search engine results either.
In summary, don’t be fooled by claims of optimization skill based solely on the number of “competing pages”. Such claims may reflect genius, but they may merely be mischief. Use more reliable methods of estimating competition before you decide which is the case.