You bother checking the intitle and inurl, because you want to know if there are a lot of serious competition or if there are few. It helps you get an idea of how long it will take you to rank.
Now you can have 2 keywords that are identical, expect for intitle and inurl.
If one of the keyword is showing 1 million intitle and inurl results while the other keyword shows 60K, then it is much smarter & easier to go after the keyword that has 50K competition as it will be easier to rank in. Where as you could end up working on the other keyword for months and even years and never reach top 40.
So what you are saying is that checking that way is a means of prioritizing before looking at the most important factor - backlinks? Don't get me wrong here, I think looking at the overall competition is so inaccurate.
I.e. you could have massive competition according to intitle and inurl, but not even the top ten have a lot of link building done, because all the competition was mostly automatic content generation of some sort, no particular kw targeting "by all means". When comparing 2 kw, it could be that the other kw has way less competition according to intitle and inurl, but the top 10 give themselves a backlink fight. Thats why I think its inaccurate and unimportant, except for prioritizing the analysis maybe.
Why are you first looking for intitle, then second looking for inurl, and then thrid looking for intitle and inurl - whats the benefit of 3 steps, when you can simply only do the last step - intitle and inurl to get a view of the competition? combining them is more accurate, and looking at them separately does not provide any benefit you can't have from combining them.
And why bother how many pages google actually sees relevant (adding the start=990)? Same scenario... 2 KW, one has like 500 pages in the search results, another one has 40 pages in the search results. Again, it means not much because its only important what happens in the top ten -onsite and offsite seo. If your onsite seo is OK you will not even have to think once about the total results google displays because you will land before all sites that have no seo and backlinks. This tells you nothing of value.
Whats your question? Be more specific. I take it that was a retorical question ?
Its not irrelevant, if you see a niche has huge amout of websites that have done intitle and inurl, then you best believe its going to be a tough keyword because the people in that niche won't go down without a fight.
Well my question was to understand why you put so many irrelevant steps into your guide. Or to be more accurate, I wondered if I missed something that makes these steps relevant to kw research. I mean you can really analyze anything to death, but the biggest problem in kw research is TIME. It takes long enough when you only do the necessary steps, but by adding unnecessary steps you only make it harder for newbies to get to the next step.
Some people like to study a whole thing, I like to study/anaylize something by splitting it into sections for a better view, if you only want to look at allintitle:"keyword" then go ahead. No one method is law when doing keyword research.
Like I said, searching for intitle, then searching for inurl, then searching for intitle and inurl does not provide any benefit over only searching for intitle and inurl (the last step). Looking at the total number of pages google sees more or less relevant for a kw provides no benefit at all. and even looking for intitle and inurl only provides a small insight into whats really true.
Or let's put it that way: You do not want to compete against sites with low relevance and bad onsite/offsite seo, unless they are in the top ten in which case you might be a very happy guy(Since you only need good onsite seo to get to the top).
You do not want to fight against onsite seo optimized competition too, unless they are in the top ten without backlinks, in which case again, you are very lucky(Now you need good onsite seo but still only a few backlinks, hurray!).
For both cases you simply can go into traffic travis and look at the blp.
If a kw has almost no BLP you got a winner there. Besides looking for traffic first, no other step would be required, but you could prioritize the kw you check by the number of inurl + intitle competition. See what I mean? Going directly to traffic travis with the kw once you know the # traffic provides little or no disadvantage over going through the whole stuff you said. But saves you a LOT of time.
Of course you can go and analyze it in a thousand ways, but when I learned something then it's to stop doing tasks that have little or no benefit and focus on the important facts.
Now the interesting part would be to find out how difficult it is to compete with the top 10 - as you pointed out blp alone still are no easy measure of the strength google sees in a url for a given kw. Question is, how to analyze the backlinks and other factors to get a good view on the real strength of the top 10. That's the point I am actually at. I've tried all the other stuff long ago and discarded it because its too unreliable but takes more time to do.
I hope you don't feel offended, I know you put quite some effort in the post and the screenshots which is cool.
