I have not written about SEO in a while, but it seems to me like everywhere I turn there is someone telling someone else how they should go look for niches with a low number of competing pages. They use the logic that since there are relatively few people directly competing for the niche with content, it should be easy to win.
First of all, this makes no sense. There are more than six billion people on the planet. Just because there are relatively few people competing for the international power-lifting championship, that does not mean that I can win easily. Why would I expect the number of competitors to be a direct measure of the strength of the competition on the internet?
Well, I wouldn’t. And you shouldn’t either.
Engineering Secrets Revealed
Let me tell you something I have learned as an engineer. Just because something is correlated to something else, that does not mean one thing is the cause of the other. This construct is actually called the cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. Just because you notice that A occurs when B occurs, that does not mean that A causes B.
What am I talking about? Well, just because you may notice that you can win some niches with low numbers of competing pages, that does not mean that you are winning them because there are a low number of competing pages. You are wining them if and only if two things are true:
- SEO Thing 1: Your page is optimized for the keyword that you are trying to win (on-page SEO).
- SEO Thing 2: Your page has more authority than other pages that rank for that keyword (off-page SEO).
It is as simple as that. It does not matter if there are 10 competing pages or 10 Million. If you are optimized for the keyword and you have the most authority, you will win. Of the two things, Thing 2 is by far the most important.
Adobe Knows About Authority
Don’t believe me about this authority thing? Google the term “click here” without the quotes. You will find that the download page for Adobe Acrobat Reader is not optimized for “click here.” Read it if you like. Take a moment to update your copy of Acrobat Reader. While it is downloading, contemplate the fact that their download page has a TON of authority for that “click here” keyword because of the millions of pages linking there with the anchor text “click here.”
God help anyone who ever introduces a product called “Click Here” – they have not got a prayer of ranking for that product name.
See, backlinks are the key to authority — that is why products like Leger’s 1 Way Links and 3 Way Links are so popular. Backlinks are the key to authority.
But Why The Correlation Between Low Comp and SEO?
So, why is low competition often correlated with easy rankings? Often it is because it is a crap keyword that no one wants and no one is talking about. For example, I completely dominate the phrase “elvis aaron presley collectible necktie”. There are only 1700 pages in competition with me. Why did I win? Because of the low competition? No. I won because no other sites had pages with any authority for that keyword. Simple as that.
So, when you are looking at the competition you need to look past the number of competing pages in Google. Look at the authority including the backlinks. If you want to learn all about how to win at that game, check out the Ultimate Link Building Report. That will set you straight.
Thanks,
Mark
