In this section of the SEO Tutorial we’ll deal with roughly estimating the number of competitors for a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and how to analyse a SERP. This is a very rough estimate, don’t take it as an exact number or because a number is low it means it’s an easy SEO SERP.
Your websites Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are determined by various SEO factors, on page content (your body text, the title tag etc…), anchor text of links to your web sites pages, the search engines algorithms tweak of the day and of course the number of websites/pages competing for that search phrase: are there a lot of webmasters targeting the search phrase.
Google SERP Analysis
The first mistake a lot of amateur SEOs and professional SEO consultants make is looking at the total number of pages found for a given Google SERP and from this limited SEO analysis concluding the difficulty and number of competitors for that Google search phrase.
This method is inaccurate and should not be relied upon, for example the word HOME is found on a lot of pages 25,270,000,000 (September 2019), not because they are targeting SERPs related to the word home, but because they use home as the anchor text of homepage links and the word home is quite commonly used within title tags: there’s over 25 billion pages indexed in Google for home!
When this SEO tutorial first went live (in 2005) the Home SERP had 5,960,000,000 pages, as I update the tutorial in 2019 the number of pages found has quadrupled! It’s going to be a rare SERP where the number of pages found will go down in the future.
Always use your commonsense when performing a SERP analysis, clearly there aren’t 25 billion webpages targeting the keyword home.
Keyword Proximity Suggests True SEO SERP Competition
A Google exact phrase match search is where you enclose your search phrase within speech marks (“search phrase goes here“) when making a search in Google. An exact phrase search removes all loose matches (see below).
An exact match would be the bold text below-
1. ‘At SEO Homepage search engine services we deliver great results’
A loose search match would be text like this-
2. ‘SEO Gold the Homepage of amazing SEO Consultants’
Keyword proximity (how close the keywords are to each other) is important to Google SEO, as you can appreciate an exact phrase match (like text #1 above) to a search engine is considered much more important than finding the keywords separated, a loose match (like text #2 above).
You can’t get a better keyword proximity than right next to one another.
Two similar webpages with the above strings of text and no other mention of the keywords SEO and Homepage you would expect to find the page with text number 1 way above the page with text number 2 for the SEO Homepage SERP.
We basically assume webpages with perfect keyword proximity for the given search are targeting the SERP either by choice or by luck (not all webmasters are SEO’s).
When you perform the exact phrase match “SEO Homepage” it gives 39,900 (September 2019). This tells us the vast majority of the 61,300,000 pages found for SEO Homepage (loose search) are not interested in the SEO Homepage SERP; only 39,900 pages are probably your true competition since they use the exact text on their page or have backlinks with anchor text SEO Homepage.
SEO Homepage loose search – 61,300,000 results (September 2019) : shows similar pages to the SEO Home search, just a different order.
“SEO Homepage” exact match search – 39,900 results (September 2019) : probably your true competition.
That is not to say a loose matching page or even a page with some or all of the keywords not present at all can’t rank highly since anchor text alone from high PageRank (PR) links or lots of links with the right anchor text like the Miserable Failure Googlebomb SERP many years ago can beat exact phrase matches.
Let’s have a quick look at the top results for loose and exact match SERPs.
SEO Homepage loose search top results
How to Create an SEO Friendly Homepage – Neil Patel
Homepage SEO Best Practices (Checklist Included)
Homepage SEO Best Practices (with 16 Examples)
Does homepage SEO exist at all? • Yoast
Homepage Optimisation | SEO Mark
Does homepage SEO exist at all? | SEO Q&A | Moz
On-Page SEO | The Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Moz
Title Tag | 2019 SEO Best Practices – Moz
Homepage SEO Strategy That Works – SEOJet Blog
The Importance of Homepage Content and SEO – SEO.co
“SEO Homepage” exact match search top results
How to Create an SEO Friendly Homepage – Neil Patel
6 SEO Homepage Mistakes to Avoid – VIEO Design
12 Things To Check In Your Local Homepage SEO Audit …
Homepage SEO Strategy That Works – SEOJet Blog
SEO Guide: 11 Real Ways to Optimize Your Homepage – WebFX
Seo Homepage | WordPress.org
Homepage Backlinks: How to Get the Right Links Through …
The vast majority have a title tags including both keywords SEO and Homepage. Title tags are one of the top Google ranking factors, always put time into crafting an optimised title tag. You can see from this SERP analysis the SEO Homepage SERP has some difficult competition.
SERP Ranking Analysis
Let’s analyse a SERP or two, using the free SERP analysis tool Google to see if we can narrow down the true SEO competition.
WordPress SEO 299,000,000 loose search results
“WordPress SEO” 2,610,000 exact search results
So we have around 300 million webpages using WordPress and SEO, of those 300 million, less than 1%, 2.6 million use the exact term “WordPress SEO”, that’s your true competition.
Using Google as a SERP analysis tool we can narrow it down further with an allintitle: Google search, with the allintitle: Google search operator we only search for the keyword within the title tag. Any webpage that’s seriously targeting a SERP will use the keywords within the title tag and if they are REALLY serious it will be exact match.
We can do a loose and exact allintitle: search.
allintitle: WordPress SEOallintitle: WordPress SEO 413,000 loose search results
allintitle: "WordPress SEO"allintitle: “WordPress SEO” 98,000 exact search results
Now we have even more data points from our SERP analysis.
1. WordPress SEO = 299,000,000 loose search results
2. allintitle: WordPress SEO = 413,000 loose search results
3. “WordPress SEO” = 2,610,000 exact search results
4. allintitle: “WordPress SEO” = 98,000 exact search results
To put things into perspective, this webpage uses WordPress SEO in the body text, but not the title tag, so will be included in data points 1. and 3., but not points 2. and 3. This webpage is NOT seriously targeting the WordPress SEO SERP and so it’s highly unlikely to be listed in the top 100, this page is not serious SEO competition for that SERP.
For this phrase “SERPs Competition” this webpage is listed for all 4 data points.
1. SERPs Competition = 391,000 loose search results
2. allintitle: SERPs Competition = 93 loose search results
3. “SERPs Competition” = 175 exact search results
4. allintitle: “SERPs Competition” = 8 exact search results
As you can see there’s no real competition for the SERPs Competition search phrase even though the loose search has close to 400,000 results.
Other Factors Impacting on SERP Difficulty
As you saw with the SERPs Competition example above from the 400,000 pages found with a loose search only 175 are using the exact phrase and of those only 8 within the title tags. This information is vital to determining the difficulty of a SERP, but does not always reflect true difficulty since if there are just 10 pages online targeting a SERP and they all do better than your page you don’t get the prized top 10 listing.
For a search phrase to provide traffic to your site you ideally want one of the top 3 listings and no less than top 10 (first page result). Other than very high traffic SERPs after the 10th result traffic practically stops and so you need to look at what actually has the top 10 listings for a given SERP.
For the record few webpages are targeting the “SERPs Competition” SERP because there’s no traffic which is why I stopped targeting the worthless SERP and started targeting SERP Analysis instead.
For this phrase “SERP Analysis” this webpage is listed for all 4 data points in May 2020.
1. SERP Analysis = 2,590,000 loose search results
2. allintitle: SERP Analysis = 1,520 loose search results
3. “SERP Analysis” = 19,100 exact search results
4. allintitle: “SERP Analysis” = 1,070 exact search results
The Google search SERP Analysis has a little traffic, a couple of hundred searches a month for the main search: SERP Analysis, plus these related search phrases which have traffic:
SERP Analysis Tool
Free SERP Analysis
SERP Ranking Analysis
Moz SERP Analysis
Free SERP Analysis Tool
Google SERP Analysis
Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis Tool
SERP Analysis Free
SERP Analysis Free Tool
SERP Analysis Moz
What is SERP Analysis
David Law
Website - SEO Gold Services
Hi, I would like to know and it seems I cannot find an answer anywhere, why is it that the competition results sometimes are higher than the actual amount of pages in google.
For example: how to get my ex back About 221,000,000 results but in reality there are only 85 pages and with 9 results on each page then there are only 765 results.
and with the word in “how to get my ex back” there are About 15,500,000 results but the actual amount of pages are 52 pages making that 562 results.
I searched using the omitted results as well and the keyword just like this “how to get my ex back” had 67 pages meaning that there is only 607 results all up.
So why does google say there is about 221,000 competing sites?
Denise
I am optimizing a site and have 5 keyword phrase i want to show up in Google. I have good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results for 2 of the keywords. But I can’t figure out how to get the other 3 to become top result in Google.
I have inserted the keywords in the title tags and image alt texts.
Can anyone tell me what else I need to do.
In the next few days I am posting a brand new website that will primarly feature photography of a particular Canadian province.
I am also planning to publish at least one photography poster featuring my work. With these elements in mind, is there a particular SEO tool that I really should work with(?) or is there a set of tools that are considered the absolute best and most valuable?