searching – Dino Vedo – Performance Marketing

Google LIES about your competition sometimes! This is something that almost all keyword tools get wrong and even Google can show you the incorrect results for. I’m talking about the true number of competing pages for your keyword. You probably know about broad, phrase and exact match when assessing competition. If not refer to the excellent Market Samurai videos which although are based around using their tool give an excellent introduction into why you want to use each type of match. I think as an Internet Marketer it’s essential that you know this. Let’s pick a keyword for me to show you. Type this into your Google search box. “homemade dog biscuits” It returns 20,500 pages. Phew that sounds like lot. Try this search. allintitle:“homemade dog biscuits” ( no spaces between the : and the “ ) This command tells Google to show you a list of all pages that have the keyword phrase homemade dog biscuits in the title, in other words your true competition. People who are Internet Marketing savvy and are not ranking by accident or by default (because someone like you has not come along with a optimized page to outrank them). Here is what Google showed. (Google lies) I got 26,700 results returned. Huh? 20,500 pages in a search and 6,000 MORE pages optimized in the title? e.g. More pages returned with titles optimized but the keyword phrase not in the text on the page. It got me thinking that something was up. By the way the 26,700 (and other numbers) Google returns may vary for you. Ok, lets take it a bit further... I kept clicking Next to get the next page of the results and lo and behold look what happened when I got to page 15. Google changed it’s mind and gave us “Page 15 of 145 results” where up until page 14 it was saying “Page X of 26,700 results”. (Google lies) Some Google Lies: So there are only 145 pages with our search term in the title (phrase matched). Suddenly thats a lot more achievable isn’t it? Your true “switched on” competitors are only 145. The big question is, why is Google doing this? Well Google is processing several hundred million queries per day, and they are all about giving the best results to searchers and not Internet Marketers (how dare they!). Couple this with the fact that their rankings update in real time across tens of thousands of computers and you quickly realize this is to cut down dramatically on the “number crunching” their servers need to do. So the most likely explanation is they only actual process the first few pages results for a list of keywords, and then only give you the real figures if you get to the end of the results e.g. when you get past their estimates they have to calculate the real result. Google lies? So to see the true number of competitors for your keyword phrase, do a search as I’ve shown you. Then you have a realistic number to work with. For me, I had to go to page 15 of the search engine results to get the true number of competing pages, its different for different keywords. Be careful not to do this too quickly or you might get a temporary ban from Google (or use a free online proxy server to avoid this). You also then have a list of all the pages from other Internet Marketers and can start checking out how their have achieved their rankings. So be careful out there, and remember Google lies! Also don't forget to check out my last post, on how to make money online!