Brainstorm It! -- Real Supply
Real Supply reveals true competition. 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. In addition, many 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.
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 getting 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 tells you that raw count. Real Supply is more fine-tuned. Think of it as an index, a score that indicates how competitive one keyword is.
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.
Real Supply not only yields more accurate results, but more stable ones. And the key point to remember is...
Real Supply is a score, a calculated index. Google 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 Solo Build It! (SBI!) system....
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from SBI! brainstorming activities
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from all the keywords by which all SBI! pages are found at the search engines.
SBI!'s activities have built a list of 65+ million unique keywords (and the list is growing).
We spider the Web, in search of good content pages. Our spider has already run through billions of web pages.
It prioritizes the retrieval of pages based on a score. Partly, it uses links to the pages to do that, as follows...
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Each time a link is found from within an internal page (i.e., from the same site) it gets a score.
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Ditto for links found that reference the page from an external page (different site) -- we give external links a higher score.
We add this to other factors and creates a long prioritized list of pages to visit. The spider then "filters and weights" the pages that prioritized highly enough to be spidered.
This "second pass" process has a variety of jobs, ranging from eliminating spammy pages to scoring pages for relevance, such that "real content" pages are weighted correctly (e.g., 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 number doubles or triples for a keyword. Did that keyword suddenly become more competitive? No. Most of it is newly spidered junk and spam.
Bottom line...
Our spider does a non-biased sampling of real content pages. It seeks out and finds good English-language content pages. It uses sophisticated analysis to do this, with the net result that you will not 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.