So you've spent time doing all the normal things to check your potential competition and rewards if you get the top rankings in Google for your keywords, but you've noticed that the estimates you got don't line-up with the reality of the traffic you end up getting - what's up with that?
For the last 10 years I've been testing different indicators for what to expect from a certain amount of traffic generation effort and to be honest with you - I'm still often surprised at the difference between what the tools and systems tell me and the traffic I see once I have those number 1 spots in Google.
Most people taking a quick look for their competition start with a search on Google and check the number of results, most website owners realize that this includes a LOT of irrelevant sites and will then check with "quotes" around their search term, this usually brings that number down a lot and is more realistic.
As time has gone on Google in particular has been placing more importance on certain aspects of their results algorithms and focusing much more on local results and on speed on results.
If your website takes too long to load you're going to get less traffic - it's a fact.
So, when you're doing your Google search what you see may not be as close to reality as you think. To most online marketers this is not new information and most people realize that (as I mentioned above) Google don't show you as much as some other systems. This is not necessarily because they're not seeing it - but because they don't want you to know about everything they see. They may tell you they only see 4 links to your site but they'll still rank it as though they see all 6000 (or however many you actually have). It's no surprise that you have to take their information with a pinch of salt.
People are always trying to 'game' the search engines and so they naturally respond by hiding what they're doing.
You may think you've got around some of this in the past by using the Allintitle: modifier in your searches and it does help, but I want to make sure you understand that you're never going to have the true picture until you get that number one spot and see what your listing brings you. Even then, you can change that number by tweaking your page title and description tags to do normal copy conversion testing for your listing.
One of the things I spoke about last year was the apparent disparity in Google's results when you see the number of pages it says it has results for and then when you click 'next' until you get to the end - often it will tell you there are thousands of pages but actually only take you to 200 and then end the results - this was always one of those weird things that people comment on but left you wondering why they told you there were so many but when you tried to see them all - most of them disappeared somewhere.
Weird....
Google's apparent reason was that they'd removed all but 'the most relevant' results for you.
If that's true and Google doesn't consider the other results meaningful it certainly explains why I have blogs that are number 1 for terms with 100,000,000 results - but that I've done no real work to market. The actual competition is obviously much lower in Google's reality.
Since Google are removing most of the results and only showing the top 1000 - you're likely to only ever see a number between 1 and 1000 in those quoted searches. To make the search quicker you can just add "&start=990? to your quoted search and you'll get Google's suggestion of the sites that are relevant - i.e your real competition.
Give it a try for your niche and see what you get.
I can tell you that it's different to what most other methods will show you - and I still don't believe it's completely accurate but it does seem better than without doing the extra check. The result of all this is that you then need to decide whether you can compete with the results that do show up. I'd like to tell you that there's a logic to the number of results and how easy it is for you to compete but I've found that it's not so simple -it all comes down to the niche - and your ability to get good links.
In some niches you'll see 400 results and the top ones are still all low page rank sites that you know you can beat, in other niches they'll be high page rank sites that you have almost no chance of competing with. So you need to do some testing of your own to be able to tell what amount of work YOU are likely to need to do considering your abilities and previous results.
I like to have a good idea about what I can achieve before I start out and luckily for me - I've been doing this for over 10 years now so I have a good idea of what I can achieve, especially considering I have my own network of sites I can get links from right away and start making a difference from day one. If you're just starting out it'll be a little different for you and you'll need to track your efforts and results in order to get a benchmark of where you can hit those juicy traffic spots.
If you're completely new you probably don't have much idea about this so you're probably best off just doing what I've told you in the past and checking out the top page of results, looking at their page rank (use the seoquake addon for firefox to make this simple) or use a tool like Market Samurai - see how many links, what the page rank is and use the search modifiers like I've said to see how optimized the existing results are to get a feel and then combine that with what you know about your abilities to get ranked in the past.
My favorite strategy for gauging what to focus on keyword-wise is to do some research and then gauge 'intention' by running some AdWords ads and seeing which keywords actually get traffic and turn into buyers. I've said it before but I'll say it again - It often surprises me how different what I would imagine would be the best converting phrases differs from what keywords actually convert into buyers.
It would be a shame to see you waste your time ranking top for a phrase you 'thought' would be a buying phrase and not focus on other phrases that in reality ARE buying phrases - so please if you can - run some PPC campaigns and get that traffic to your site before you put a lot of time and energy into ranking for it and then find disappointment because the traffic doesn't convert.
Unless you're just after brand awareness - you probably want the keywords and phrases that actually convert into buyers.
To your success
Andy
Andy Henry is a published author and regularly writes in the fields of Business, Psychology and Marketing. You can find more from Andy over at: [http://www.turntoandy.com/blog/].
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andy_Henry
