As I mentioned before, it’s important to know that competition scores should only be used as a filter to find possible keywords. After you got the keywords, you need to look at the top 10 search results to determine if it’s really worth targeting that keyword in a blog post.

This is in order to see actual competition, but also to filter out common sense points. As an example, I was considering to target the phrase “Google Keyword Planner” in a keyword research post. However I found out that several specific keywords containing this phrase are part of some kind of a Google test, and people search for it 350 times per month only to find the answer to the test question. That is not the kind of traffic you are looking for. The search intent is totally different and will not convert well.

If Google ranks e-commerce stores for a keyword, that means it’s a shopping keyword and your review or affiliate post has no chance of ranking even if the domain authorities of the search results appear to be weak.

In order to determine competition, it’s enough to look at the top 10 results, as those are the pages you are competing with.

Below are the points to consider when you try to determine whether you are able to rank for a certain keyword.

Title – few sites targeting the exact keywords
2 sites or more less than DA 30
2 sites or more less than PA 30
Weak results – Quora, Pinterest pin, forum, Twitter profiles, garbage content, the same site two or more times
No e-commerce results
Short, low quality blog posts that you can easily beat

How To Analyze Top 10 SERP Rankings To Determine Competition