What does High SEO Competition really mean?

Hi Guys,

First post - but I've been lurking here for ages.

I have a nebbish question - what actually is high competition when looking at SEO? Does it mean high number of back links with specific anchors? Does it mean high authority, high PR etc? Or is it a combination?

What are some numbers (in terms of back links etc) that I should keep in mind to know if there is high, medium, low competition? Or does that not really matter, if all back links come from less than ideal sources?

Is it just a matter of time before a new good blog with high quality content comes on board and takes over the position?

What kind of tools can I use to determine high competition? If the quality of these back links aren't any good, but there is hundreds of thousands back links, does this mean it is high competition?

Sorry for the noobish question.

I should also say that I am not looking at adsense competition, but natural organic competition if that makes sense.

seo in 2011 is outdated, unless you practice seo on a daily basis its hard to tell what works for your particular niche. i mean, a lot of people here have seen their sites deindexed, and some have seen drastic increase in rankings. as far as i'm concern, backlinking still plays a major role in your site's ranking. the quality of the backlinks matters a lot now a day... for instance, a backlink from a scraped blog comment is worth almost nothing compared to a backlink to you from an authoritative website. an example would be, if you blogged about something and the content was out of this fucking world, like really amazing, and some authority website found it and use and was kind enough to reference you in their blog or article or whatever, you'd get a lot of benefit from that back link.

amount of backlinks required depends on how saturated your niche is. some sites need thousands of backlinks to rank cause its so ddamn competitive, some sites need like a dozen. so it really depends on your competition. so keyword reasearch is key... no pun intended.

i believe that the only way you can keep up with another blog or site similar to you is to always do better than them in content, so that users will always reference back to you if they want more information.

there are lot of tools you can use to scrape for your competition's backlinks. i personally use ultimate niche finder, and that's really the only tool in my arsenal for surveying for keywords i can work with and to scout out for what type of competitions i'm up against.

and to be honest, it's hard to really answer your questions because no one knows your master plan for dominating the serp and pr... lol, but if you want to build a website that can maintain, you gotta make a serious seo blueprint and change it along the way as needed. best of luck!

It's usually mean a combination of things. For example, if you have a competitor who has 20-30 backlinks from sites like NY times (in organic section, not comments or any other spammy ways to get a link from high authority site) I can guarantee you that this is a high competition. On the other hand if you have some one with 20K directory and forum profile links, it is a very low competition, because you can get those types of links in those quantities from services offered on this site pretty cheap. But those are 2 extremes, most of the sites are somewhere in between.
But to answer your question. High competition usually means how much effort and money it will cost to get the same type of link profile as your competitor has. The longer it is the more competitive industry is. There are no set numbers for estimate, since different people have different experience in obtaining links, plus there are a lot of factors to consider, so it is pretty much up to you to decide if the niche is competitive or not.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I'm getting the sense that it doesn't really matter on the quantity of links, but more so the quality. If there are hundreds of thousands of backinks to a site (e-commerce site), but all relatively low quality then it should be easier to outrank if I provide quality content (i.e. blog, or helpful articles etc) and also have some high quality back links.

Cheers

Having high quality backlinks can increase and boost your sites ranking.

SEO competition that most people quote is actually a the number of competing web sites that target your keyword in some way. The Google stat is based on advertisers in adwords, I believe. Your real competition is the sites that have your keyword in the title of the page. These sites actually have a page about your keyword on the site, so they are really competing with you instead of just mentioning your keyword on their pages.

To find this go to Google and search with this operator:

"intitle:keyword phrase" (without the quotes)

This is your actual competition worldwide for that keyword. I will go for anything short of 10 million.

"High competition" to me means that the first page of Google search results are mainly:
- High PR (PR4+ depending on the niche)
- Old, domain age of 2+ years
- A large number of links to the ranked page (not total links to the domain)
- The url, h1/h2 & description all contain the keyword (on-site SEO). As well as the SEO boost that these fields provide, it also provides you a strong indication on whether or not the site owner has optimized the ranked page for this specific keyword or if it is just there "naturally" or as a byproduct of other work.

After these basic checks are done in Market Samurai I will then start digging into the backlinks.

So many people are using Web 2.0's with link wheel's / link push systems that the number of backlinks is often very misleading.