Many SEOs quickly get discouraged due to the numbers. Many searches in Google will return a mind numbing results count that will make many SEOs think not once but too many times if it's worth starting out on a certain keyword / keyphrase. Result count of tens of millions will discourage anyone. But you are not paying attention.
Many consider the result count express the true search engine competition your brand new website will have to face in order to rank for the targeted keyword or keyphrase. Well, it isn't! It's only the number of times the targeted keyphrase is mentioned on a page.
So wether the text is mentioned once or the page can is optimized for it, that page will show up in there so the result count is somehow artificially inflated from the point of view of search engine optimization real competition. Usually over 99% of pages are not optimized on your targeted terms.
It's really easy. Some terms are so popular that they get mentioned on too many pages. And some other terms are targeted by web spammers. They need link juice and in order to get it they will spam hundreds of thousands of backlinks from Guestbooks, Forums and any site that can be spammed.
Web spammers will generate a lot of fake competition by just mentioning your targeted keyphrases in their link spamming. So in order to understand the real competition you have to find pages that are optimized for that very keyword or keyphrase you target. You have to know how to spot your real competition in the search engines.
The image below shows the result count for seo. This is actually the number of times this is mentioned on pages across the web.
The new image shows the result count of pages that are actually optimized for seo. This pages are actually optimized for the targeted keyphrases and will be considered search engine competition.
I guess you noticed the difference between the two searches.
As you have noticed the first search was only for the search engine optimization keyphrase. On the second I used the Google Advanced Search Operators to find the real competition.
Real competition are pages that are optimized for the targeted keyphrases and will have to obide some basic seo principles:
Seo in order to be considered optimized the page has to have the keyphrase in title, in text, in links pointing to it and to tip the balance in the url! To find pages that follow these basic principles you have to combine each term of the search with the following Advanced Google Search Operators: intitle, intext, inanchor, inurl.
This method has to be used only for the numbers. The real competing URL are found using the regular search but the number of competing sites will be found using the technique mentioned here. I cross-refferenced the lists and got a 12% match on first 100 results between the two Google searches mentioned in the images above.
Keep in mind that low competition count does not mean you have to put little work against them. Soon, I'll share some other methods to undertsand popularity of search terms to really grasp the strength of the competition.
So … just look at the numbers and not at the results of the advanced search. It's not reliable to list competing sites as Google sorts it on an ' I have no idea how it works ' internal algorythm.
