One way SEO’s gauge the competition for a particular keyword phrase is to use the Google advanced operator allintitle. I called this post “The Mighty AllInTitle” because in our SEO bag of tricks and tools, this is one of my favorite power tools. AllInTitle tells us how many pages that Google is aware of that use the keyword phrase you specify in the title of a web page. That’s a real good indicator of what you are competing against to get a Top 10 ranking. Here’s an example:
This shows us that for the phrase:
NJ Diner
Google is telling us it is aware of 78,000 web pages that have those words in the title. They could be in any order and there could be more words but for sure at least those words are present in the meta title tag. 78,000 is a huge amount of competition.
When we look ar the SERP for
NJ Diner
we see Google report that it is aware of almost 27 million results for that phrase that are relevant in some way, more or less. Actually in this case, the 27 million answers are mostly hardly relevant. Many researchers looking at a results page will look at that “results” number and they assume it gives an indication of the competition for that page. It really does not give an indication of competition. That “result” number is an indication of:
- how frequently the Google main index has either one or more of the words in the database
- how many similar words Google sees in it’s database to one or more of the words in your search
- how many links or references Google sees in it’s database for one or more of the words.
When you add all those up it makes a number of debatable importance. I use the “results” number to get a ballpark estimate of popularity, but only if the number is near zero. If it’s near zero the chances are that you will also have nearly zero competition for the phrase revealed when you look at the allintitle. SEO Maverick Corey Eulas told a crowd of search professionals during a New Jersey presentation in June, 2009 that he never uses that number for anything and it has no relevance to any optimization formulas.The main point he stresses is to make sure you don’t think that “result” number has any correlation to competition for the phrase you just searched.
