What is considered a highly targeted phrase

is 1,040,000 results a lot?

[Total Paranoia]

I have just realised I have moved from #9 to #1 for a two word phrase (a product) that has 1,040,000 results on www3.

I have another phrase from a different site that is currently #155 out of 3,000,000 results for its primary phrase. I would obviously like to push this up to the first page over the next 3-4 months but I do not know if this is too much of a highly targeted phrase to bother with. Am I aiming too high too soon?

How many results do you consider to be a highly targeted phrase? Would you consider a #1 result out of 1,040,000 to be a good acheivement through clean SEO?

[Edwin]

Are you putting "" marks around the search terms to get those figures?

[Total Paranoia]

no, these searches are without "" marks. Why?

[Edwin]

You'll get a better idea of how difficult it is to get in on a specific 2-word search term with the "" marks. Without, you'll find all pages with those search terms *anywhere* on that page.

For example, ranking #2 for "used cars" should be much more valuable than ranking #2 for _used cars_ (I'm using _ as a delimiter here)

[SlyGuy]

It really all depends on the industry your in, Total_Paranoia.

In my case, I have a bunch of number one spots in the SERPs and the results are anywhere from 75,000 to 4,500,000. Sometimes the "highly targeted" phrases have the smaller returns. I know that may sound weird, but I know it to be true.

Search for "company [google.com]" in google. You'll probably pull about 80 million results. This is not a highly targeted phrase.

A large chunk of our traffic comes from a highly targeted phrase that returns about 83,000 results.

The short answer? Yes. It's a wonderful achievement to attain a #1 result, regardless of the total returns, especially through solid, clean SEO.

Good Work.

- Chad

[rfgdxm1]

This is incredibly good for clean SEO [isn't that an oxymoron? ;)] if the competition is really also optimizing for this phrase.

[HitProf]

The number of results is not all that important. What counts more is how strong the competition is SEO-wise.

[rankme]

Total Paranoia:
>>I would obviously like to push this up to the first page over the next 3-4 months but I do not know if this is too much of a highly targeted phrase to bother with.<<

In my experience, it's best to ignore the gazillion results that are returned for a phrase (it looks daunting, but shouldn't be). You can legitimately rank high even with all that competition- it depends on how well optimized the competition is, and how/why they got there.

"too highly targeted to bother with"? Why not just check your logs. If people are finding you through that phrase, it's not too targeted. Wordtracker is also a big help here.

The other thing to consider is that generic one or even 2-words keywords may be searched more, but are they really related to the company's business? Targeting = better prospects. No targeting = bandwidth hogs who don't want what you have, anyway.

[Total Paranoia]

Thank you SlyGuy and Rankme, I understand exactly where you are coming from and have taken it onboard.

<<Isn't that an oxymoron>>

rfgdxm1 - Not at all :) Any site that is optimised according to googles guidelines IMHO is clean SEO. By clean SEO I mean no duplicate domains or sneaky redirects/hidden text etc.