Sometimes  "competition" is not  "competition". There are some things we can do to discover the "real" competiting pages in the search results are.  Presumably, we have done our keyword research and found relative keywords to bring targeted traffic to our site.

For this exercise let's use the example of researching the term "write an article."

This term has a search volume of about 880 per month, (for the exact phrase) and if we looked at our regular Google search we would see that our term in quotes returned just over 23 million results.

On the surface, that would seem like a tough nut to crack, but let's investigate....

While those 23,000,000  pages will have the term somewhere, many of those results will include pages or websites where the term appears, but not in high value places, such as the title tag, some image tags, and in anchor text by pages linking to those site. In other words, they will have not applied even basic SEO.

Having said that, I'm assuming that you have followed good SEO for your on page optimization, otherwise you will be among the back markers too. Employing even some basic SEO for your page or site, will help immensely in zooming past lots of that "false competition"

So How do we find The Tough Competition?

If your competition was using even basic SEO, then probably the first thing they would do is put the phrase in the title tag of their HTML code.

Using our regular Google search, and the allintitle operator we  have now already zoomed past a whole bunch of 'em. (22,500,000 odd to put a number on it)

So our keyword phrase which just a short while ago seemed out of the question, now

is a much more practical proposition.

It's still not a cakewalk to outrank 574,000 pages, but we now know how many pages we are really competing with!  To get past the remaining 574,000 your on page optimization, off page optimization and promotion, will need to be done well BUT it is achievable.

We can now check on how many pages are competing for off page optimization as well.

To do this, use the Alexa toolbar, which shows  details about the website open in your browser.

Take a look at some of the top pages returned in your Phrase search in Google. In this case the top result, copyblogger.com/write-article-fast.

The Alexa data shows  the number of pages linking to this site. If you wanted to outrank this page you would have to beat their number of links, or have less but better quality.

On the keyword tab, it shows us what keywords bring most traffic to this page. This can be handy sometimes as well to get some keyword suggestions.

In summary, this exercise probably showed us we would not go after this term because it still has some serious competition BUT not as much as it first appeared. That's what it's all about....information...