Competition in Google – Who Cares?

We’ve all heard, read, or seen it before.

If you’re doing keyword (KW) research, then there are a few generally accepted things that you should research, regardless of what kinda tools you’re using (Google’s Adwords Keyword tool, Market Samurai, Micro-Niche Finder, etc).

Those things are:

1 – how many searches the KW gets

2 – the competing results in google for the KW

3 – the commercial intent of the KW

Now, #3 is easy enough to determine, in my book. Just type the KW into google. Are there paid ads everywhere? If so, great – the KW has good commercial intent. (That means there’s a good chance the people searching for that KW are potential buyers – if they weren’t, chances are nobody would pay for that traffic.)

#1 can be broken down into global vs local results, broad match vs exact match vs phrase match, etc. But that’s another topic for another day.

What I wanna talk about is #2 – the competing results in google. Why? Because I think most people have it all wrong.

See, general consensus is to look for a KW that has fewer competing results. After all, the fewer results there are, the better right? I mean, wouldn’t it be easier to rank on the first page of google if there are only 20k other competing pages, rather than 2 million?

Most of the time, yeah. But right about now is when I have to bust out something ESPN’s college football analyst Lee Corso would say…

“Not so fast, my friend!”

In my mind, it doesn’t really matter how many competing results there are for a given KW in google. All that really matter are the results on the first page. Because you wanna be on the first page (and the higher, the better – preferably top 3), right? Well, if you can beat out the site at #3, then you’re gonna beat out all the rest, aren’t you?

Yup.

Does it really matter if there’s another 50 pages of results or another 5000 pages of results? Nope – because if you can beat out the site at #3, everybody from there on down is getting bumped down a spot…doesn’t matter how long the list is for “from there on down”.

Think of it like this (and this is the standard analogy I use in this situation) – say an elite distance runner is getting ready to run the Boston Marathon. Does he really give a damn that there are over 20,000 people running in the race? Or does he worry about how fast the top 15-20 guys competing are?

He only concerns himself with beating the top 15-20 fastest guys – because if he beats those, he beats everybody else. No sense in studying how Joe McRunner from NowheresVille, Montana might place if he won’t crack the top 10,000 runners. Our elite runner doesn’t wanna beat a guy that won’t crack the top 10,000 – he wants to beat the guys that will crack the top 10.

Same with analyzing your KWs.

Say you found a KW that only had 10k competing results (which is hardly any), yet every site on the first page was from an aged, high PR, very liked, trusted, and respected authority site within that niche. You’ve only got two chances that you’re gonna break the top 10.

“Slim” and “none”. And “slim” just left town.

But let’s say that for a different KW (for the sake of discussion, we’ll assume the same number/type of searches and commercial intent), there were 250k competing pages, but the entire first page of google was taken up with listings from Ezine Articles, Squidoo, review blogs people had setup, etc.

Which would you go after – the one with the fewer competing pages or the more competing pages?

Truth be told, you wouldn’t give a damn about the competing pages…all you’d care about would be that you would have a much better chance of getting yourself a good google ranking for the 2nd KW mentioned…even if there was a lot more competition in terms of numbers…the competition would just be a lot less quality.

THAT is what you should be paying attention to when doing your KW research.

Tags: competing pages, google, keyword, keyword research, KW