c2webdesign said:
As expected the first result on Google for 'Mastermind' is the BBCs website - with 14million sites in competition. It will be very difficult at best to leapfrog them!
Correct, Google suggests a competition for this keyword circa 14.5 million but that does not actually mean this is the true competition but rather the sheer volume of pages that contain the word 'mastermind' within Googles index. This is irrespective of whether all or any of those pages are targeting that actual word. Obviously, a large number will be intentionally targeting that word.
It is very likely that the true competition could be as low as just 10% of that figure as within that 14.5 million there exists many millions of noise pages whereby the page is not actually targeting the keyword in itself but is merely appearing in the results because that word is present on a page. The difficulty when analysing single word serps is in establishing the switch out point from sites that are very likely to be targeting the word to sites that are not targeting the word.
For example; when doing a search on Google.com for a two word keyphrase such as business forum, it initially shows the search competition as being in excess of 800 million, this is not a true figure of pages that are likely to be targeting those two words so cannot be called 'competition'. A more accurate competition figure is nearer to 5.5 million and even then, not all that 5.5 million will be targeting the two words business forum as there'll be a load of search noise associated in the 5.5 million too.
Drilling down into the 5.5 million there appears to be a switch point in the results at position 817. This is somewhat fewer than the 800 million Google indicated earlier as being competition.
Going back to the mastermind keyword, the BBC site comes up top for mastermind but with only 389 links going to the actual Mastermind page this suggests that the root site is responsible largely for it's 'mastermind' number 1 position.
Let's inspect some of the others on page 1.
Looking briefly at the 10th position on page 1 of Google.com for mastermind, this page
http://enchantedmind.com/puzzles/mastermind/mastermind.html
has only 27 links going to it and a Page Rank of 4. The home page of this site has a PR of 5 and just over 300 links going to it.
So from what looks initially like 14.5 million competition can be boiled down into factual competition and achievable targets by some simple analysis. It appears that a maximum of 264,000 pages are targeting the word mastermind although noise pages will still exist within that figure.
Leapfrogging the competition is a reality within quite easy grasp.
Competition should never be viewed merely by the volume of pages that occur for any given search term but by determining the true competition via known techniques and analysis.
Look at competition this way.
Is it easier to get a page 1 ranking for any given keyword if there's 10,000,000 pages showing in the results for that word but not one of those pages has been seo'd for that word! Or, is it easier to get to page 1 on a keyword that has only 100 pages showing in the results but every single one of those pages has been professionally seo'd?
:wink:
