So how much competition does that phrase have?
I would say it does not have any competition other than the two pages relating to my article.
If you were to create a page with that phrase in it, your page will be one of only 3 in Google with the exact phrase, so surely Google would see your page as more relevant than the 866,000 others that just contain the words that make up the phrase. Of course, you would need to get a link or two to that page with the exact phrase in the link text to help your page rank well.
This is the reason I search for competition using quotes around my phrases. It gives me an idea of how many web pages have been optimized for a phrase. We all now how important inbound link text is to the ranking of a page, but if the phrase is not on the page, there is a good chance it is not being targeted in inbound link text either.
In some competitive niches, you may still not rank at #1 for the phrase even if you are the only one in Google using the exact phrase, but you do at least have a good headstart in your optimizing strategy, and can then turn your attention to getting links to the page.
Finding competition for your phrases is a time consuming task, but fortunately you don't need to do this for all your phrases, as Wordtracker calculates this for you.
It would be great if we could find keyword phrases that were searched for 1000+ times a day and had no competing pages in Google. Unfortunately the sad truth is that any keyword phrase that has 1000 searches a day, will already have been found, and targeted by hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of other webmasters.
In general, the more a phrase is searched for, the more competing pages it has in the search engines. No amount of on-page optimization (the words on your webpage) is going to get you a top 10 position in Google for a very competitive phrase. As you will find out later in this course, off-page factors are more important, and these take more work from you.
Related to this quotes/no quotes issue is finding where you page ranks in Google.
When searching for where your page ranks, you obviously want to know the position your page will appear when the majority of people search for the phrase.
Very few people search for stuff using quotes, so neither should you when you are checking your rankings.
About The Author:
This article was reprinted from the eBook "Creating Fat Affiliate Sites". Download your free copy of "Creating 'Fat' Affiliate Sites".
