In this section of the SEO Tutorial we’ll deal with estimating the number of competitors for a SEO SERP.
The first mistake a lot of amateur SEOs (and professional SEOs for that matter) make is looking at total number of pages found for a given SERP and from this limited information concluding the difficulty and number of competitors for that search phrase. This method is inaccurate and should not be relied upon, for example the word HOME is found on a lot of pages (1,780,000,000 pages!!), not because they are targeting SERPs related to the word home, but because they use home as the anchor text of home page links.
Look at the SEO Home SERP, 5,360,000 pages found with a loose search (just type the keywords and search, no speech marks etc… so a loose search) for SEO Home, which would suggest a difficult SERP with quite a lot of competition. But this loose search alone tells us nothing about real competition for the SERP, what we need to know is of those millions of pages how many are targeting or at least mentioning the exact phrase SEO Home, those are your real competition.
Exact and Loose Phrase Match Searches
An exact phrase match search is where you enclose your search phrase within speech marks (“search phrase goes here”) when making a search in Google etc… An exact phrase search removes all loose matches (see below). An exact match would be the red text below-1. ‘At SEO Home search engine services we deliver great results’A loose search match would be text like this-
2. ‘SEO Gold the Home of amazing SEO Consultants’As you can appreciate an exact phrase match (like text #1 above) to a search engine is considered much more important than finding the words separated, or a loose match (like text #2 above). So two similar pages with the above strings of text and no other mention of the words SEO and Home you would expect to find the page with text number 1 way above the page with text number 2 for the SEO Home SERP.
When you perform the exact phrase match “SEO Home” it gives 13,900 pages. This tells us the vast majority of 5,360,000 pages found for SEO Home (loose search) are not interested in the SEO Home SERP; only 13,900 pages are your true competition since they use the exact text on their page. That is not to say a loose matching page or even a page with the some or all of the words not present at all can’t rank highly since anchor text alone from high PageRank (PR) links or lots of links with the right anchor text (like the Miserable Failure Googlebomb SERP) can beat exact phrase matches.
An Example SERPs Competition Calculation
We’ll use two SERPs that at first glance appear to have similar levels of competition, at least from just looking at the total number pages found in Google with a loose search (the inaccurate measure of competitor pages). Then using exact phrase match searches to show how one is relatively easy and the others is relatively difficult.Loose Searches
MSN Today : 9,850,000 pagesPsychology Today : 8,700,000 pages
Based on this information alone MSN Today should be the harder SERP by a small margin, more pages using those two words should mean more competition.
As you can appreciate an exact phrase match to a search engine is considered much more important than finding the words separated (loose match). So finding a text match like-
1. “At MSN Today you’ll find a search engine hardly anyone uses”
Will be considered more important for the SERP MSN Today than the loose matching text below-
2. “Earlier Today the search engine MSN crashed due to excessive use from the alt.internet.search-engines newsgroup community!”
Both have the two keywords, but number 1. will be considered more relevant (all other things being equal of course) than number 2. This doesn’t mean number 2 can’t show high for a search for MSN Today, but without supporting anchor text (links using the anchor text MSN Today or derivatives) it is highly unlikely.
Exact Phrase Match Searches
“MSN Today” : 10,600 pages“Psychology Today” : 1,150,000 pages
The exact phrase “MSN Today” is found on only 10,600 pages out of almost 10,000,000 (just 0.1%).
The exact phrase “Psychology Today” is found on 1,150,000 pages out of almost 9,000,000 (~15%).
For the purpose of determining real SEO competition for a SERP you can all but ignore the loose search matches.
Other Factors Impacting on SERP Difficulty
As you saw with the MSN Today example above from the millions of pages found with a loose search only 10,600 are using the exact phrase. This information is vital to determining the difficulty of a SERP, but does not always reflect true difficulty since if there are just 10 pages online targeting a SERP and they all do better than your page you don’t get the prized top 10 listing.For a search phrase to provide traffic to your site you ideally want one of the top 5 listings and no less than top 10 (first page result). Other than very high traffic SERPs after the 10th result traffic practically stops and so you need to look at what actually has the top 10 listings for a given SERP.
Keeping with our MSN Today example the first two pages are-
1. http://www.msn.com/ PR9 with 815,000 backlinks in Google with many using the anchor text MSN.
2. http://join.msn.com/ PR7 with 130 backlinks in Google with many using the anchor text MSN.
Even though there are only 10,600 pages listed for this SERP it would be very difficult to beat these two pages, they have high PR and more importantly a lot of the links will use one of the keywords of this SERP (MSN). To beat these two pages you will need good on site optimization and quite a lot of links (probably enough to make your page PR6) using the anchor text MSN and Today (not necessarily together). You will notice you don’t need as many links as the two pages above since neither of them is optimized well for the phrase MSN Today. They are optimized for MSN though, so the lack of optimization for the Today part makes obtaining the SERP a little easier (but still difficult).
Looking beyond those two pages we have- www.slate.com/ PR7 with 8,310 backlinks which appears to do well thanks to the word today(s) within the content and links using the word MSN as anchor text (http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:www.slate.com/+MSN+Today). This is the type of page that can be relatively easily beat with good on page optimization and relatively small number of links using the exact phrase. So top 3 for this SERP is a real possibility without having to go overboard on the SEO and top 20 should be obtainable with little to no use of anchor text (mentioning the phrase MSN today several times, like this page).
MSN Today SERP Update: July 1st 2005 this page is 6th for the MSN Today SERP. Not bad for no links using that as anchor text or even basic on page optimization. We’ve added a couple of links to the page now with anchor text MSN Today, top 3 is a real possibility.
Quick SEO Tip – If you want to ONLY see the loose matching pages of a SERP use this search format in Google; Search Phrase -”Search Phrase”. This search will only show pages that have both words Search and Phrase but not in the format Search Phrase.
SEO Caveats
A few SEO caveats about SERPs and how some SEO’s manipulate potential clients. You will find on a lot of SEO company websites lists of SERPs the site or their clients sites rank well for in Google and other search engines. Read through these SERPs lists carefully you will almost always find they consist of really easy search phrases, SERPs that you would get with little to no optimization.One SEO firms web site we visited recently listed phrases like-
SEO consultantAnd stated they have top 20 listings in Google for them all. Sounds good must be pulling in thousands of targeted search engine traffic, but look closer only the 1st two (in bold) are of any real benefit to a SEO firm, the rest will not result in much if any traffic. They are listed to ‘bulk up’ the SERPs (make it look good to a potential client). The reality is the majority of the above SERPs will result in a handful of visits a month, not exactly the SEO benefits the firm wants to portray!
SEO expert
SEO benefits
SEO perspective
SEO robots.txt
SEO software reviews
SEO spam
SEO template
SEO timescale
So when you see a list like this go through it and see if this really is a successful site or just flim flam.
Here’s a few worthless top 10 SERPs this site has in Google-
Domain Name SEOSome of these sound fine, but we got them from our August 2005 web logs, specifically looking for phrases that have resulted in less than 5 visits that month. So as we’ve listed 10 SERPs above that comes to less than 50 search engine visitors per month (closer to 20 visitors a month). Not very impressive when you do the maths.
Perfect Meta Tags
MSN Today
SEO Template
Adsense Advertising ProgramGoogle for dummies
What Not to Wear Trinny and Suzanna we are a little embarrassed about this one
0 comments
Post a Comment