Google Optimization Using Search Operators
The underlying premise of SEO suggests that you understand the task at hand when it comes to outranking the other 999 entrants for any given keyword.
Google stops indexing a particular keyword after 1,000 results when assessing the aggregate relevance score to determine which results are spawned. By truly understanding this, you can discover a great deal from using a few basic Google search operators to determine what type of foothold a competitor has for a given keyword or niche.
Basic Competitive Analysis Metrics
1. Start with the keyword you are interested in researching. Place the keyword “in quotes” in a Google search box.
For example “SEO” returns 262,000,000 competing pages with the chronological order of the strongest sites first.
Then look to the right and determine the number of competing pages you are up against “for that keyword”. It will say results 1 of 10 of (the number of competing pages).
This allows you to assess the competitive landscape with one brief metric. The extent of what you consider a competitive keyword depends on the website. For example, most websites can acquire a keyword under 50,000 competing pages with ease and competitive keywords start above 100,000 results and ascend into the millions (pages in index / divided by the top 1,000 results).
The next few metrics will allow you to understand where your SEO ceiling is (what threshold your website has for keyword benchmarks). Our blog for example can devour a keyword with up to 1,000,000 competing pages just from one post of mentioning those keywords (without backlinks).
So, all the talk about building website authority does have a place when you understand the implications to rank with less effort. Authority sites have the ability to zero in on a keyword and skip over hundreds of other websites and reach the top 10 results by the merit of trust and internal link weight and dynamism they possess. In keeping with the topic at hand, let’s move to the next metric.
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