Regarding "keyword", allintitle, allinurl etc for Measuring Competition

Why do people still look at these value?

They were once used as indicators, my personal favorite was allintitle but they were never accurate to begin with.

Building more than 3k+ micro niche sites to date I personally have seen keywords with low allintitle values that have tough Top 10 competition.

Why do people still request this information.

Please enlighten me, maybe there's something I missed.

IMO these give you a first impression of how many sites are targeting the keyword. but thats all! without taking a deeper look they won't tell much! i personally like to have all the data i can before stepping into a keyword.

It can tell you how much sites would be ranking for a particular keyword.. but i'm sure it won't tell you the strenght of competition!

clade said:

Building more than 3k+ micro niche sites to date

Click to expand...

hats off dude u must be making a bank

People request this because every keyword research tool out there has it. They have it because it's a super easy feature to implement and gives the illusion that it's providing some relevant info. Same with keyword density and stuff like that.

Basically you should always be creating a site with optimal on-site factors such as page title, keyword density, content length, mixed media content (text/images/video) and internal linking.

For the most part, it's not much of a competition strength indicator but it can matter. For example... Let's say you're top competitors for a keyword have few back links but don't have the keyword in their page title and/or a low density of that keyword in it's content. This would indicate that you could out rank them by properly inserting the keyword into the page's content without needing to get more back links than them.

In reality, pretty much all things would have to be equal aside from the keyword not being in the title to really matter much. It's not something that will likely occur very often.

Typically the number and quality of back links will be the biggest factor, followed by the keyword being in the domain name, page content, etc.

So "all in title" is a crap metric 99.9% of the time.

Also, for those who think the number of competing sites matter, it doesn't. It's the strength of the top ranking sites that matters. If your up against 20 PR7-9 sites on the first & second page for your keyword, does it matter how many other sites are out there? Only if you're aiming to be on page 3!

BlackHatSoda said:

People request this because every keyword research tool out there has it. They have it because it's a super easy feature to implement and gives the illusion that it's providing some relevant info. Same with keyword density and stuff like that.

Basically you should always be creating a site with optimal on-site factors such as page title, keyword density, content length, mixed media content (text/images/video) and internal linking.

For the most part, it's not much of a competition strength indicator but it can matter. For example... Let's say you're top competitors for a keyword have few back links but don't have the keyword in their page title and/or a low density of that keyword in it's content. This would indicate that you could out rank them by properly inserting the keyword into the page's content without needing to get more back links than them.

In reality, pretty much all things would have to be equal aside from the keyword not being in the title to really matter much. It's not something that will likely occur very often.

Typically the number and quality of back links will be the biggest factor, followed by the keyword being in the domain name, page content, etc.

So "all in title" is a crap metric 99.9% of the time.

Also, for those who think the number of competing sites matter, it doesn't. It's the strength of the top ranking sites that matters. If your up against 20 PR7-9 sites on the first & second page for your keyword, does it matter how many other sites are out there? Only if you're aiming to be on page 3!

Click to expand...

Totally agree. I always wondered how people could say that allintitle was a good way to see competition. Well, what if there were millions of competing pages but the first ten sites were not optimized for shit. I recently found a niche that was like this and there were over 2 million competing pages. First ten restuls were pr2s with little onsite and very few backlinks. If I were to go on the assumption that a lot of competing pages (2-3 million) meant that there was too much competition, I would have missed out on a great niche.

I agree with Trota.

I only use it to see how many people are actually targeting and trying to rank for that keyword. Normally if there are few competitors going for that keyword, then it is usually easy picking IMHO, but I do not have 3K sites so maybe I dont have the whole picture yet.

IamNRE said:

I agree with Trota.

I only use it to see how many people are actually targeting and trying to rank for that keyword. Normally if there are few competitors going for that keyword, then it is usually easy picking IMHO, but I do not have 3K sites so maybe I dont have the whole picture yet.

Click to expand...

Actually the SEOC value is good in addition to analysing the Top 10 competitors.

High SEOC value means when you do your link building campaigns, you'll see slower results.

I would have to agree with that. The higher the number, the longer it normally takes to rank in top 3 pages.

IamNRE said:

I agree with Trota.

I only use it to see how many people are actually targeting and trying to rank for that keyword. Normally if there are few competitors going for that keyword, then it is usually easy picking IMHO, but I do not have 3K sites so maybe I dont have the whole picture yet.

Click to expand...

It doesn't matter how many or how few people are targeting a keyword. What matters is how strong their sites are.

What's harder? Trying to fight your way through 10 top ranked heavy weight boxers or 1,000 1 year old kids?

If your goal is to be on the first page of Google's SERPS for a particular keyword then your only competition are the top 10 sites. Why would any of the other ones matter?

BlackHatSoda said:

It doesn't matter how many or how few people are targeting a keyword. What matters is how strong their sites are.

What's harder? Trying to fight your way through 10 top ranked heavy weight boxers or 1,000 1 year old kids?

Click to expand...

Haha! So true. I could beat up a million one year old kids. At least I hope I could

BlackHatSoda said:

It doesn't matter how many or how few people are targeting a keyword. What matters is how strong their sites are.

What's harder? Trying to fight your way through 10 top ranked heavy weight boxers or 1,000 1 year old kids?

Click to expand...

Of course it matters....

If your building micro niche sites, and you want to rank for small easy to rank keywords.... do you want to target keywords that have 10s thousands of competitors all targeting the same keyword(s) as you?

As soon as you reach on page x ... there are 10 or 40 other sites that over takes your places coz they are also targeting the same keyword. Then your stuck in a long fight.

Just my $0.02

SEOC is a good indicator, when you happen to launch a new site and want to slide in to the market by merely optimizing your onsite content. But harder the competition goes, less you need to care of seo'd pages. At the end only things that matters are the high quality links pointing to your site. I've seen poor quality sites with low quantity content ranking on top for hard keywords. Why it happens? Because owner got relevant high quality diverse links to the site naturally increasing rate.

But it all really depends where you start from. At first I would say traditional measuring of competition by different search factors is important, but when growing its becoming less important. But why would you not take care of SEO of your site, if you already made it with framework like WP that does it in behalf of you?

"So all in title is a crap metric 99.9% of the time."

Yes and 99.9% of all BS e-books teach to do the "allintitle:" search.. No wonder almost all newbies (like me) wasted time in the beginning doing that and relying on those factors instead of doing a solid top-ten-competition check.

IamNRE said:

Of course it matters....

If your building micro niche sites, and you want to rank for small easy to rank keywords.... do you want to target keywords that have 10s thousands of competitors all targeting the same keyword(s) as you?

As soon as you reach on page x ... there are 10 or 40 other sites that over takes your places coz they are also targeting the same keyword. Then your stuck in a long fight.

Just my $0.02

Click to expand...

I'm not saying that a low competing page result count can't correlate to low competition, it can.

I'm saying that it's not always the case that a lower page count means lower competition and therefore isn't reliable. Plus, there are much more solid ways to determine competition strength so there's no point in using this metric.

Back in the old days when there was nothing but allintitle and PR it was a better metric (although still not as good as looking at the PR of the top results). But these days when you've got tools like Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO which do complex analysis, there's no reason not to check the top ranking sites and throw allintitle into the trash.

Here's one quick example. I had to use the second result for these terms because Open Site Explorer didn't have info on both of the first results.

allintitle: cats - 23,500,000 results
allintitle: weight loss - 17,000,000 results

Second result for "cats"
www.cats.org.uk
PR6
Page Authority: 66
External Followed Links: 4,776
Total Linking Root Domains: 779
AdWords Aprox CPC: $1.25 (US Exact Match)

Second result for "weight loss"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_loss
PR6
Page Authority: 76
External Followed Links: 14,141
Total Linking Root Domains: 1,674
AdWords Aprox CPC: $5.03 (US Exact Match)

Looking at just the result count, it would appear to be a good bit easier to rank for "weight loss" than "cats". Even looking at the PR of the first result looks as though they would be somewhat even.

But the Open Site Explorer data suggests it's harder to rank for "weight loss" and the fact that people are paying over 4 times more to bid on "weight loss" in AdWords than on "cats" strongly suggests that "weight loss" is a more lucrative keyword and would therefore invite stronger competition in the SERPS.

This is just one example of course but it shows that looking at result counts can be misleading and that there are much better metrics to use.

You need to find out the competion of the top 10 and the SEOC to determine.

And, yes SEOC works. Anything less the 2500, with a good standing site - you be on page 1 on 2 - 3 days with zero backlinks.

Providing you know what you are doing.

So what is the easiest method to judge competition automatically?

Without checking backlinks of competitors sites, as this could be quite expensive,especially if you judge a large numbers of keywords - like 100 000 per day.

check "ilovepage1" if you want to automate allintitle research for many keywords

Stop bumping old threads with your spam!!