How good is your ranking?

How good is good?

[wibble]

I've often seen people mention stuff like "keyword combo (2 word) out of 1.6mio possible" in threads.

I want to know how good is good. Not blowing my own trumpet but is 4th out of a possible 8,240,000 for what I consider competitive good? I'm not a full time SEO and don't know other people doing search engine marketing (apart from here) so I have nothing to benchmark my results on.

[IITian]

1. Number in the serps is for ego-boost, check how many appear for "keyword1 keyword2" with quotes.
2. Look at the top ten list. If there is more than one amateur site ( www.freeserver.com/user/friends/keyword1-keyword2.html ) in that most likely it is not a competitive search.
3. Check the PR, backlinks and how long they have been online for the top ten sites.
4. Check how much is the bidding for Adwords for this or related search term.
5. Check the optimization techniques used in the top 10 sites - number of pages, anchor text, keywords in the tite, keyword density and so on.

This will get you started.

[DerekH]

Not blowing my own trumpet but is 4th out of a possible 8,240,000 for what I consider competitive good?

Yes, that's very impressive, but it's not really the best benchmark.

Are you fourth for the amount of traffic you get, or does your site come up in the SERPS but the snippet not look inviting?

Are you fourth in the number of visitors you can convert into sales, or do they visit and wander off to the next in the SERPS?

Those are the questions that pay the bills. As others will tell you, getting into the top of the SERPS is important if you're to get noticed, but it doesn't pay the bills <smile>
DerekH