What makes a searchterm competitive?
It amazes me how often we get posts in forums where the writers don’t have a clue as to what a competitive searchterm really is, so I thought I’d explain exactly what it is that makes a searchterm competitive.
The only thing that makes a searchterm competitive is when other people are actually competing for it; i.e. when they are optimising their pages and links for it. That’s all.
Here are some of the things that I’ve come across where people think a searchterm is competitive, but it isn’t.
They think that a searchterm is competitive because a large number of results are returned for it. It isn’t. A search on Google for the word [the] currently returns 4.9 *billion* results, but does anyone compete for that searchterm? No. Alright, it would be very difficult to get a page into the top 10 for that single word, even though nobody actively competes for it, but it makes the point.
I saw a thread today where a person was saying how easy it is to rank #1 in Google in the face of competition, and he gave an example of his work. Sure enough, his page was ranked #1 out of 1.75 million results for a particular phrase. But when the phrase was searched in quotes, there were only 37 results; i.e. only 37 pages in Google’s entire index were concerned with that phrase. And only one of them (his page) actually put it in the page Title, so he was the only one who was taking steps to compete in that particular race. When you’re the only one in the race, it’s very easy to win! Overture shows a grand total of zero searches for the phrase during last month. Even though Google returns 1.75 million results, the phrase is totally uncompetitive. The thread is at the SearchEngineWatch forum, and the phrase is temporary stair access.
That’s the biggest thing that people get wrong. They mistakenly equate the number of results with competitiveness.
Another mistake that I’ve come across was somebody claiming certain phrases to be competitive, simply because they concerned a high finance industry - oil! His idea was that, because the oil industry deals in huge sums of money, the few companies that are in it must compete very heavily, and therefore industry phrases must be very competitive. He actually spent 25 pages of a forum thread arguing his case - but he was completely wrong.
The client site that he dealt with was on Google’s first results page for phrases like [rotating choking sleeve]. To demonstate how uncompetitive his phrases were, somebody simply wrote a page about one of them, which was in the top 10 within days. In the forum here, we have a thread about it, two pages of which are at #3 and #4 in Google - his client’s pages are at #5 and #6!
It’s not the number of results, or the amount of money in the industry, that makes a searchterm competitive. It’s the number of websites that are actually competing for it that matters. If only 11 websites in the entire Web are competing for a phrase, then one of them will always be left out of the top 10. The level of competition between the 11 can become very vigorous, but there will always be one that isn’t in the top 10. A phrase that returns many millions of results can be very uncompetitive because nobody is actually competing, whereas a phrase that returns very few results can be extrememly competitive because they are all competing vigorously. Competition makes a searchterm competitive, and that’s all.
SEM Basics said,
November 6, 2006 @ 8:34 am
Hello Phil,
I am actually writing a few articles about this issue, the first of which is already done. It is called How to Analyze Your Keyword List and can be seen here: www.sembasics.com/sem-guides/keyword-strategies/keyword-analysis-for-seo. In the next few articles I plan to discuss how you analyze the top results in the search engine results to try and indicate the competitiveness of a word as well as discuss various tools which can be of assistance. I’ve admired your posts at SEW for a while now and have read and enjoyed some of the articles on your site and therefore would love to hear what you think of this article as well as the future ones(constructive criticsm welcomed). Any and all insights/ideas you have on the subject are welcomed and wanted.
Thanks for raising the issue. It is a problem. The fact that some people and/or companies still use KEI contributes (I think) to the problem.
All the best,
Moshe
SEM Basics
P.S. Nice blog, I’ve just added it to my Google Reader.
PhilC said,
November 6, 2006 @ 8:55 am
That’s an excellent article, Moshe! In fact I posted about it in the forum:-
http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?t=14603
Thank you for the kind comments, btw
SEM Basics said,
November 6, 2006 @ 9:34 am
Uggghhh! I forgot to answer the math question and lost my comment!
Well, in short, I’m glad you liked it. If anyone wants to further discuss this issue (either here or in the forum) I’d love to hear what people have to say.
Take care,
Moshe
SEM Basics
Neale said,
November 6, 2006 @ 9:37 am
Thanks Phil & Moshe great articles !
vishnusankar said,
November 10, 2006 @ 8:57 am
Hello Phil
I saw this article link which was post by U at your forum ok and thanks for your great information and your work.
Druid said,
November 16, 2006 @ 12:46 pm
Yes, and perhaps ‘Scaffolding Stair Access’ is a more appropriate phrase, or maybe even ‘Scaffold Stair Access’ . I have read the articles and the Blogs and it occurs to me that the author of the site was acting on his/her customers instruction. However just how relavent are those keywords. ?
The answer must be that ‘Temporay Stair Access’ is not very relevent at all. Where as, ‘Scaffolding Stair Access’ & ‘Scaffold Stair Access’ are. Lets face it, should someone in the UK scaffold industry want such a product those are the key words that they would most likely use.
So i tried ‘Scaffolding Stair Access’ & ‘Scaffold Stair Access’ (without quotation marks, because most people do not use them when searching. And both came number one in Google, above all their UK competitors. ‘Scaffolding Stair Access’ & ‘Temporary Stair Access’ are also number one in Yahoo.
There seems to be a little jealousy going on, a lot of knocking the success. But say what you will the designer of the site has met his/her customers needs.
PhilC said,
November 16, 2006 @ 1:24 pm
There’s no jealousy at all, and no reason for any.
I disagree with that. The person may well have met the client’s desires, but definitely not his needs. Let’s have a look at those two alternatives that you suggested.
There is a massive two pages in Google’s entire index that contain the words in Scaffold Stair Access in their Titles, and neither of them have them in the right order. And there’s a whopping one page in Google’s entire index that has Scaffold Stair Access in its Title - again, not in the right order. In fact there are exactly zero pages in Google’s entire index that are actually targeting those phrases.
So what about those phrases in page content? Well, there’s a grand total of one page in Google’s entire index that has the phrase Scaffolding Stair Access in it, and even then it’s just coincidence that the words are adjacent because they are split by a grammatical comma. And there are a mere 40 pages containing the phrase Scaffold Stair Access.
Or, to put it another way, those phrases are just about as uncompetitive as you can get.
Now, when ascertaining a client’s “needs”, an seo must go for high search engine rankings for phrases that people actually search on when looking for what the client has to offer. It doesn’t make any difference if the phrases are uncompetitive as long as people actually search on them in reasonable numbers. During last month, only 27 people search the whole of Overture.com and its partners for scaffold stair access, and zero people searched it for scaffolding stair access. The numbers for the UK are a lot less of course. So, whilst the client may get a few handfuls of visitors from top rankings for those phrases, there must be other phrases that will do better, and he really needs the best ones.
The point of this thread isn’t whether or not an seo did his/her job properly - it’s about what makes a searchterm competitive, and none of the phrases are in any way competitive. I notice that you said your two phrases are more relevant, and they may be, and you didn’t suggest that they are competitive.
» Hidden stair access followup - Marciahoo said,
November 20, 2006 @ 9:12 pm
[…] On Nov. 6th a post was done on hidden stair access concerning how to tell how competitive phrases are for search results. What’s interesting is that there was a link to the Google search for it in a Search Engine Watch thread, and PhilC also did a commentary on the hidden stair access competive issue at his forum, which can be found linked to from the Google Search result for the phrase, as well as on his blog. […]
PhilC said,
November 20, 2006 @ 9:25 pm
Hi Marcia.
Google’s current top three rankings for [temporary stair access] are very interesting. Since the discussion came up at SEW, that thread has gained the #1 ranking, the thread in the forum here has gained the #2 ranking, and for good measure, the RSS feed containing the blog post here has got the #3 ranking - all ahead of the original site, which now trails them at #4. So much for the phrase’s competitiveness, huh
lazer epilasyon said,
March 5, 2007 @ 3:31 pm
thanks a lot for your really usefull articles.
Ian C said,
March 16, 2007 @ 2:34 pm
Hi Phil,
I just stumbled across this thread – a very enjoyable read. While I agree that the term is not competitive, I just wanted to mention that sometimes these phrases can be worth pursuing and act in accordance with a client’s true interests and not simply with their wishes.
Yes, almost no search traffic exists for phrases such as these. But if your client is involved in an industry where a single lead can generate ‘x’ thousands of dollars and make up a significant chunk of their annual revenue, then optimizing for these phrases can still be an absolute money winner for the client. If your page has a 2% viewer to customer conversion rate, then even a meager 50 visitors a year looking for such a term results in a sale that more than justifies the expense and effort of optimizing for a non competitive phrase.
I just wanted to mention this point lest some people think that optimizing for such a phrase is never in the client’s interest. Again… great article!
All the best…
Ian