Competition Time! Ready?

The Simple topic today is competition. Maybe you are a competitive person and perhaps you are not but there are only 10 places for your keyword on page one of Google and there's 10 sites there already.

Something's got to give!

The only way you are going to get on the front page or any other page really is to beat somebody else.

Well you don't actually have to fight them, but your website does. And you have to be able to judge whether or not you can make a space on the front page so we'd better take a look at that now.

Sizing up the opposition ain't easy and there's lots of ways we are told to follow.

• We are told to count the number of pages in Google that contain the keyword we are aiming at.
• We are told that it's better to find the number of pages that have our keyword in quotes
• And the folks at the Warrior Forum tell us that really it is just the sites on page one that we should count so there's only ever 10 competitors.
  

Who is right here?

The fact is that there is simply not a reliable way to measure how tough page one for your keyword is. We take our best guess and that's it., As a Physicist I would like a neat equation or calculation but there is no way we can do it.

Firefox to the Rescue

There are 2 Firefox plugins that can be used to help us estimate how strong page one is. One is called SEO for Firefox and that's the one I use. So let's have a look at how we can use that and size up the competition.

You can install "SEO for Firefox" by using the search term "seo for firefox plugin download" and downloading and installing it. It will only take a few minutes.

Then when we search for "Dog training" we get this extra information on Google's front page.

What extra information? Under each website listing there is a line of extra data from Firefox.

First we get the order on the page – a #1 in this case

Then we get the PageRank  – 4 in this case followed by the Age of the site and the number of backlinks at Yahoo.

And we get this kind of data for the whole search page. This is very useful and fast and is good enough for a quick decision.

Competition criteria

A page one is easy if the majority of the sites are PageRank 2 and below and if the backlinks are less than 50. If the ages of the sites are zero or low numbers it indicates that other sites have moved into that space and you might be able to as well.

This is "rough and ready" and we will go into detail in later posts but frankly this is good enough to stop beginner marketers from charging into a tough fight that they cannot win

So my question to you is how you judge competition – what are your criteria? Do you use any particular tools?