Allintitle:Scooter Hire Ibiza
Allintitle: is a Google advanced operator, its purpose is to restrict search results to pages that contain specific words within their title. It works by selecting a subset of pages from within Google's index that meet the criteria set out in the allintitle: search and then ordering and rating them in the same way it would any other set of results.
So typing allintitle:scooter hire ibiza into Google will return all the pages Google has indexed that include scooter hire Ibiza in their title and exclude the rest. So it would seem to be a simple way to judge how competitive a term is, based on how many pages are competing for that term.
The allintitle: works well, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, however it is this accuracy that is its downfall. For example a normal search for scooter hire Ibiza returns 52,000 results, a search for allintitle:scooter hire Ibiza returns 30 results. That’s a colossal difference brought about by excluding pages that don’t include the desired terms in their title. But if you have a keen eye and look closely at the results you will quickly see that something is amiss.
The first three results returned from a normal search have been excluded from the allintitle: results. But it’s worse than that, 60% of the first page results are ignored even though they managed to get front page rankings. How can this be? Take a close look at the page 1 results from the normal scooter hire Ibiza search and you will see that the following 6 pages were ignored because their titles do not contain all three words:
- Ibiza Scooter rentals
- Ibiza car hire - rent a car
- Ibiza Car Hire Companies
- Transport / Private Driving Ibiza | Ibiza Hire and Holiday Services
- Motorbike, Mopeds, Quad & Mountain Bikes | Ibiza Hire and Holiday Services
- Ibiza Transport
Quite clearly a search that ignores 6 of the 10 most important results is flawed if you are trying to get a handle on how competitive a keyphrase is for SEO purposes. How many other pages are being ignored in a similar fashion? Probably many thousands.
It's only the first 10 results that count
It’s the first page of results that matters, this is where you will get the clues, unfortunately, no arbitrary number is going to tell you how they achieved the rankings that you’re aiming to grab. Important as it is, there is more to driving rankings than just the page title, a fact that renders the numbers produced by allintitle: searches completely useless. Links, site architecture, authority, domain age and many other aspects of a site come into play. So if you want to know how your main online competitors are achieving their top 10 position, you need to roll up your sleeves and start to reverse engineer how those rankings were achieved.
In Summary
When you, or the SEO Company you hire, are checking out the competitive landscape, only a few of the thousands or perhaps millions of competing pages truly matter. The pages that are relevant enough, powerful enough and trusted enough to gain front page rankings are the pages that count, this is the competition. It’s of no consequence how any page outside this elite group achieved their rankings. Therefore the number of pages returned by an allintitle: search, or any other kind of search for that matter, is irrelevant, unless your goal is to join the majority of them in complete obscurity.
Comments
Useful hub Peter. I guess it is inspired by the recent forum discussion you had with a fellow hubber. You really have cited nice example to back what you said. I also believe that the first 10 results that appear in google are your main competition. You don't have to beat everyone, you just have to beat them.
Read a short story somewhere:
Two man in the jungle sees a lion in front of them. One man slowly removes his normal shoes and starts wearing sports shoes. The other man says, "There's no way you can outrun the lion. The man says, "I don't need to outrun the lion, I only need to outrun you.
Rated up!!
- Author
Thanks englightenedsoul, greatly appreciated.
The discussion referred to can be found at:
hey Peter
nicely explained, wish you'd just gone with that in the forum instead :)
well-made point and a great example, but I would counter that terms with any real level of competition wouldn't show results as markedly different as that, because anything even mildly competitive will have a significant amount of people doing exact match titles for it?
and then when the results are compared against the allinanchor: search as well you can see if you're link heavy or light for the term against the others.
The litmus test I suppose is that if I am correct in my approach (allintitle: 30 pages is childplay etc) I must be betting that this hub is into the top few places for "Scooter Hire Ibiza" ultra fast?
I promise not to link at it and I dont think you need to either ;)
I do understand your approach, and we do have clients in some very small but extremely tight searches, and as you say if there's only 10 good sites on the first page, it could take you a while to get there, so how many are behind you (at that stage) is irrelevant.
However launching to #12 and then breaching front page is probably still easier than starting from the several 00's to do the same thing?
- Author
Google Analytics should prove to you that exact match phrases are extremely rare. Few search engine users actually know how to search for an exact match phrase. Those that do tend only to use it if the can’t find what they are looking for through Google’s default search results.
If you do see exact match phrases in GA, it might be a sign that you need to push that phrase a little bit harder.
sorry I didnt mean exact match as in a searcher typing "phrase with quotations" I meant that if people are trying to rank for "luxury hotels" there's a fair chance they'll use those words in the titles?
and I just looked this hub is on page 5 for the term, so in this respect I am surprised and it seems you've made your point stick, as I would have expected entry much higher
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