Brainstorm It! -- Real Supply
Real Supply reveals true competition. Many years ago, Sitesell was the first company to introduce the concept of niche research through Demand (i.e., Search Volume) and Supply (number of competitive Web pages).
Since then, the Web has grown astronomically. Google and other engines provide the number of Web pages that contain a certain keyword in them. But that number is becoming less and less of an indicator of real competition for that keyword.
90% of pages are pure junk and not competition, created by scammers and spammers to make money from Google. In addition, most pages likely "contain" the keyword but are not really "about" it. Those pages are not competition, either.
So you need a number that can give you a quick, accurate fix on how high real competition is for all of your keywords.
Do You Need Advanced Competition Analysis? Use Site Info
Site Info give you reams of superb competitive data. It delivers a great deal of very granular information, so it's ideal for studying a relatively small number of high-potential keywords.
More info in DAY 4 of the Action Guide.
Try This "Get True Supply Experiment"
Do a search at Google and scroll through page after page of Search Results until you stop reaching "real" Content Pages. Everything after that is junk, except there's no strict cutoff. It just gradually deteriorates. Repeat for each of your hundreds of keywords. Of course, there's one rather big problem...
It would take forever. You'd never get any work done. The solution?...
Real Supply, which reflects this basic concept of true competition.
"Page junk/spam" is a problem, and it's going to get worse. More spam. More scam. More junk. But not that much more serious competition. So...
Enter Real Supply!
Do not think of it as a certain number of pages -- Google Supply tells you that raw count. Real Supply is far more fine-tuned. Think of it as an index, a score that indicates how competitive one keyword is, compared to the others in your MKL.
If a keyword's Real Supply changes over time, it's because there really is a change in respect to other keywords, not because the number of pages on the Web suddenly tripled (as you see happen on the engines! -- professional Search Engine trackers increasingly complain about "bloat" and page spam, and the uselessness of the number of pages that "contain" a keyword as an accurate measure of competition).
Real Supply not only yields more accurate results, but more stable ones. And the key point to remember is...
SiteSell Real Supply is a score, a calculated index. Google Supply gives you the raw number of pages. You cannot compare the two directly.
What Does Real Supply Do?... And How?
Here's how it works. First, Real Supply gathers all the keywords that ever enter the SBI! system....
- from countless SBI! brainstorming activities
- from all the keywords by which all SBI! pages are found at the Search Engines
- from our own little Web-crawling spider, called SBIder.
SBI!'s activities have built a list of 60+ million unique keywords (and the list is growing). Most of those come from the third activity, spidering. The spidering does much more than merely accumulate tens of millions of keywords.
SBIder spiders the World Wide Web, in search of good content pages. It has already run through billions of Web pages.
SBIder prioritizes the retrieval of pages based on a score. Partly, it uses links to the pages to do that, as follows...
- Each time a link is found from within an internal page (i.e., from the same site) it gets a score.
- Ditto for links found that reference the page from an external page (different site) -- SBIder gives external links a higher score.
It adds this to other factors and creates a long prioritized list of pages to visit. SBIder then uses proprietary technology to further "filter and weight" the pages that prioritized highly enough to be spidered.
This "second pass" process has a variety of jobs. They range from eliminating spammy pages (90% of the Web!) to scoring pages for relevancy, such that "real content" pages are weighted correctly (ex., pages with "accidental" one-of occurrences of a keyword score low).
Finally, we tally this all up for each keyword, normalize the number to 1 billion pages, and deliver what we call "Real Supply." This normalization is important...
Whether we have 500 million, or 2 or 10 billion pages that pass all of Real Supply's filters and tests, the final score is "normalized" to 1 billion. So Real Supply provides a real indication of competitive supply compared to other keywords.
Why is this so important? Well, compare that to what the engines report...
It's annoying when the Search Engines' general Supply numbers double and triple suddenly for a keyword. Did that keyword suddenly become more competitive? No. Most of it is newly spidered junk and spam. To some degree, these numbers are a marketing exercise for the engines ("my page index is bigger than yours").
Bottom line...
SBIder does a non-biased sampling of real content Web pages. It seeks out and finds good English-language content pages (it is not yet dealing with any words with accents). It uses sophisticated analysis to do this, with the net result that you won't see 41 million pages about "anguilla" suddenly jump to 108 million.
That's not realistic or possible. And yet, that exact jump happened at the Search Engines, and later suddenly dropped to 70 million.
Real Supply provides a more accurate, realistic and stable number. When it changes, it really changes because a keyword has become "hotter" (or "colder") compared to other keywords.