How hard will it be to rank these keywords in Google?

[jarvis]

Hi everyone! I really need some help with a keyword issue that's been plaguing me.

So....I spent literally the entire weekend (this weekend), looking up variations for a keyword that I'm interested in targeting. It's for a vertical in the tech niche.

Here's what I did:

1.) Found a keyword related to an affiliate offer that I've been interested in promoting, but never knew how. 3-words in the keyword.

Here's an example keyword: "optimize my computer"

2.) Next, I went to ubersuggest and found roughly 200 variations of this keyword; optimize my pc,speed my pc,optimize computer,make pc faster, etc,etc.

3.) Then, I removed the keyword variations that weren't relevant to my main keyword, and the keywords that seemed like blatant "non-buying" words.
(if that makes any sense!)

4.) Finally, I took those keywords, and entered EACH one into Google. I took note of the competition results, and copied those numbers on the list also.


I now have 60 keywords that are related to the main keyword group.


I would like to know if the keywords with the lowest amount of traffic have a good chance of getting on the front page in Google, if I REALLY work hard with SEO on my website and promote the content as much as possible? I am wondering if I stand a good chance of getting to the front page if I go with any of the BOLDED keywords below?

Nearly of the other keywords have between 5,000,000 and 500,000,000 pages coming up in the results! Which was my mistake in the past...targeting words with unbeatable competition, at my stage. So I guessed these numbers are more realistic, as far as words to target??

Here are the numbers:


keyword 1 - About 163,000 results

keyword 2 - About 233,000 results

keyword 3 - About 303,000 results

keyword 4 - About 313,000 results

keyword 5 - About 476,000 results

keyword 6 - About 677,000 results

keyword 7 - About 682,000 results

keyword 8 - About 922,000 results

keyword 9 - About 1,220,000 results

keyword 10 - About 1,220,000 results

keyword 11 - About 1,430,000 results

keyword 12 - About 2,720,000 results

,....etc...etc


------

I've been doing lots of reading about good SEO practices, along with my previous "experience" NOT ranking sites. Lol.

In the past, I was going after keywords with millions upon millions of competing websites, wondering why I am getting absolutely no Google traffic for my chosen keywords.

I want to know if I'm at least on the right track. Thanks everyone for any input you can give me!

 

[gphalen]

From what I understand, the number of results is really one of the less important things to look at when analyzing the competition. I think you should be focusing less on how many results each keyword has, and more on what type of sites are appearing on the first page of Google, and whether or not those websites or pages would be easy to outrank. From my understanding, that's the best way to determine how possible it is for you to get your site onto the first page. I'm just a newbie myself so don't take what I have to say too seriously, but I've been doing a lot of research on competition analysis and that's the basic concept I've picked up from a few different people and it seems to make the most sense to me. You can help determine that with things like page rank, page authority, mozrank, and how many backlinks both the page and domain have, but more importantly how many of those backlinks are from authoritative sites. Another important factor to look at is whether or not the pages on the results are even targeting the exact keyword, or if they are even really related. If not, then that's a good sign.

use open site explorer to check page authority and domain authority. I'm pretty sure that page authority is much more important, I don't know about exact numbers, you should probably look into it but I think 30 or less is best.

use the moonsy mozrank checker to check the mozrank, again I really don't know exact numbers but I think 3 or less is best but don't take my word on it.

MajesticSEO will show you the top 10 domains which backlink to the website, just make sure you sort it by citation flow and/or trust flow to get the right results. I'm not really sure the difference between those but I know sorting it that way will show the most authoritative referring domains.

I'm sorry that I can't post any links because I don't have enough posts so I'm not allowed to, but if you want links to a couple resources that I think explain this pretty well, send me a PM and I can give them to you. Well, I would assume I can at least send urls in a PM.

There are a bunch of free tools that will give you page rank so I'm not going to bother telling you what you should use for that but page rank of 0-2 is best.

If I were you I would do more research on competition analysis. Honestly, judging from the keywords you're targeting and the number of results alone my guess would be it's way too competitive, but again I'm just a newbie so don't think that means it actually is. Really what's most important is figuring out how to judge what websites and pages you could out rank. I hope this was helpful, good luck!

 

[theshoe]

To find the true competition for your keywords, here's an excerpt from a report I downloaded.

First go to Google and do a search in quotes, let’s say “weight loss”, then you go to the end of the url displayed by Google at the top of your browser and type in &start=990 and hit enter.

Scroll to the bottom of the page, were Google tells you the REAL number of relevant pages for that keyword.

So it is not 105,000,000... Google only considers 847 results as the most relevant for this search query. This is your real competition.

What, only 847 competing pages?

Yes, but don’t let this mislead you, 847 is really competitive you want to go after keywords with 0 to 400 REAL competing pages.

shoe

 

[jarvis]

Thanks so much for the response!

I'm sorry, I should have included more details. I have a copy of Market Samurai, and I am familiar with analyzing SEO competition; analyzing domain age, trust flow, backlinks, etc, etc.

But my problem is, the data in Market Samurai is sometimes tough to reconcile with data pulled up in Google. So I really wanted to know, all else being considered, is it easier to rank terms when there are less competing pages altogether for certain keywords. But...you pretty much answered that question too!

And gave me some useful information that I didn't know as well. Especially that Google trick to find REAL competition. Wow, we really learn something new everyday, huh?!

I'll definitely be checking out Majestic SEO.

Thanks again!!

 

[gphalen]

That's an interesting trick, but I don't really see what it would be doing to change the results, all it seems to do is start from result 990 instead of 1. I'm assuming that number is deceiving, so I wouldn't trust it just based on that. When I changed it from &start=990 to &start=1110 this is what google gave me.

"Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 1110.)"

So if Google only ever returns 1,000 results anyway, it really seems like the number of results really only matters when there's less than 1,000 results. Google is so confusing and mysterious sometimes...

Read the thread on warrior forum called "Discover YOUR TRUE Competition &start=990" and they explain why this trick seems to be pretty useless. You should try adding allintitle: before your keywords on google and it will show you the number of results that are trying to target that keyword in the title of their page.

There's some really great info in that thread. This post sums it up pretty well:

Google returns no more than 1,000 results for any search. Therefore, purely looking at a number of "competitors" is mostly a useless exercise when it comes to SEO. Who cares if there are 10,000 pages indexed by Google or 10,000,000 pages indexed by Google for a particular keyword? That number is NOT relevant to whether or not you can rank for a particular keyword phrase.

As I've taught all of my SEO students for a long, long time: the "competition" you need to look at is the first page of Google results.

Of course those who teach poor or lazy SEO or like to tout: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 41,000,000 results! That must PROVE that I'm good at SEO". Uh, no, sorry. But I guess it does sound better than saying: "See? My page is ranked #2 out of 1,000 because Google will only return 1,000 results anyway!"

Your "competition" must be judged on STRENGTH and not QUANTITY. Period.

Also, another thing to keep in mind about why the competition on the first page of Google is so much more important than the number of results is the statistics on how many people click on the top postitions in Google. There have been a few studies on this and they have all gotten pretty similar results. In an AOL study they found that:

* Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of clicks
* Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of clicks

Another one by Optify found Rank 1 had a 36.4% CTR, Rank 2 had a 12.5% CTR and Rank 3 had a 9.5% CTR on average. Also, average CTR on the first page was 8.9% and only 1.5% on the second page.

 

[newlxx]

Never look at the number of results. You should only worried about the results on the first page of google. Analyse those with SEOquake or Ahrefs and see if u can outrank them

 

[Dario]

It depends about your SEO skills and experince,you should be able to rank for some of them.