The importance of title competition

[Kerry]

I've just had a big aha moment in terms of SEO! In Market Samurai I always looked at SEOC but until recently I hadn't looked at SEOTC, the title competition. This shows the number of websites that have the keyword or keyphrase in the titles - you could say websites that are actively targeting the keyphrase by putting it in the title of the article instead of just mentioning it casually.

Many keywords or phrases have much higher Title Competition than the general Competition. This I believe explains why a couple of sites were not getting anywhere fast. It also opened up a new set of potential keywords which I'll come to.

Here's a real life example: around mid April, I set up a site based on ebook marketing. (I'm not worried about giving away the niche as I wouldn't go for it again based on my discovery!)
I got a new domain name including this phrase + a word at the end and it's a .com

• phrase match results are 325 per day
• SE

O comp is 132,000.
Based on that (and the fact that it's something I can write easily about) and that there were more keywords and phrases in the group to get some higher traffic I was prepared to take on this competition and do a bit of extra work to get up there.
I have 5 posts with this this keyword in the title which I did in the first week, I did some social bookmarking also in the first week and since then I have added around 5 other posts with related topics but not including this keyphrase. I haven't done any more linking and the links I did post are not showing in Market Samurai.
I am at position 826 on Google as of today.
And I'm pretty sure the reason why is that title competition is 908,000!

Next real life example:

• My main key phrase only has 95 searches per day
• Competition is 536,000 so normally I never would have gone for it
• But title competition is only 2810
• I got an exact match domain name which is a .com

I put up a site, added 1 post on day 1, another on day 2 (plus a couple of links out as it started off as a link building blog to our main site), 2 more posts on day 3 and I'm already at position somewhere between 13 and 11 on Google after a week. (in fact it got there on day 2). No link building yet.
So today I spent 4 hours on it and have high hopes of moving up the ranks when I do some link building. I'll let you know how it goes!

I'd like to hear other people's experience or thoughts on title competition. My new policy is only low title competition keywords - under 20,000 title comp but preferably well under 10,000. (unless it's for my main domain keywords in the email market as we're prepared to build that one over time).

[Tim Buchalka]

Title competition is a great way to assess competition. It's a measure of your serious competitors and not just those ranking by default. If your keyword phrase is in the title of your page, you know something about SEO

Thanks for the great info!

Cheers


Tim

[jeffjohnson]

Thanks for sharing such useful article.. title competition plays vital role in seo.. thanks for sharing your experience and research..

[ngovgroup]

Every web page should have a good title and description since it is one of the most important ranking criteria for search engines. The page title and description will influence how often your website is visited and an effective title and description will help attract the visitors most interested in what you are selling.

[webvivre]

Title competition is a starting point - but you need to study the competition on page 1 for your keyword. If they have, for example, high PR, 1000s of backlinks then you are going to struggle!

[Mallory]

The Title-tag is one of the most important pieces of information for a search engine. The Title-tag should describe exactly what the web page contains. It should contain keywords, but not repeats, of terms you hope to be found for. It should also be as readable as possible. The Title-tag will be the first thing someone sees in a search result.

The Title-tag should be no longer than 70 characters and should contain words and phrases that accurately describe the content of a page. Try to make the Title-tags located throughout your site unique and relevant. Every word in the Title should be contained somewhere on the page they are used for. Research has also shown that a strong call to action will usually produce more clicks than a basic description.