credit: Mareen Fischinger

No, PPC competitions is not the same as SEO competition.

Let’s use my name, Carlos del Rio, as example.

Organic Search Competition

Organic content is a relatively slow moving target. As time passes there is increasing competition, and even stale content continues to compete for placement. The mass of accumulated links can keep out-of-date information high in search queries.

Assessing your organic competition involves looking at the natural results for your phrase and assessing the strength of your competitors:

1.) How many results are there?

Google reports about 2,320,000 results for Carlos del Rio.

2.) What major sites are involved?

• Amazon
• Flikr
• Linked In
• Facebook
• Emory University
• Center for Disease Control
• Travel Sites
• CNN

3.) Identifiable competition

• Me
• An AIDS researcher
• A doctor in Massachusetts
• A real estate agent in Colorado
• A painter
• An author
• A photographer
• A mission in northern California

4.) What visible links do they have?

Sites range from 700 to 79,000,000 individual pages range from 0 to 482 visible links.

5.) How optimized are the titles?

Most of the titles in the broad search are clearly different. Many of the URLs contain only part of the phrase, or none of it.

6.) How much is anchor text affecting the results?

An inanchor: search finds only 73 results. This combined with the low visible links to pages means that links are not a major factor in this search.

Results are largely driven by content, and not links, means that entering the space is fairly easy. However, there are many directly competing entities and large amount of competing content — so your results will likely be volatile at first.

PPC Competion

1.) How many competitors show up in a manual search?

As of today there are 5 regular competitors for Carlos del Rio: Travel, Medical, Painting, Shoes, People Search. None of the results are show location; so they are probably not geo targeted.

2.) What competition does the advertising portal show?

Google rates Carlos del Rio as a very low competition phrase; this means there probably are not a large number of regonalized/geo-targeted competitors.

3.) What search volume is there?

Google reports an average of 1600 searches per month and an average cost of $1.42 for first place.

Entering a paid space with 6 competitors and only 53 searches per day is rather bleak. In general only 1 in 5 clicks are on a paid listing that means you have a total of 7 ads competing for 10 clicks a day.

A Different Phrase

Compare that to the search space for Stephen Fry:

There are 2 million results for Stephen Fry; 1.5 million of them show up of inanchor: searches. Stephen is an author, a comedian, and an actor. Content about him holds every spot in the top 20 of Google, every result has the full query in it. Site links range from 114,000 to 400,000,000+ visible links and individual pages range from 1,100 to 114,000 visible links. In spite of a lower amount of results the competition to appear in this particular search result is significantly higher than ranking for my own name.

Now for PPC. Manual search finds only one advertiser. Google reports high competition, 33,100 searches per day and an average cost of $0.40 for first place. In spite of AdWords claim your real competition for clicks is extremely low (considering more than 1000 searches per day and no visible competition) for this phrase and your cost per click is relatively low.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of what you are looking at and what it means when you are assessing your competion