Determining SERPs Competition

Determining SERPs Competition

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 SERP and from this limited information concluding the difficulty and number of competitors for that 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 home page 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.

There aren’t 25 billion webpages targeting the keyword home.

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