Micro Niche Finder – Secret formula for calculating the strength of competition

Micro Niche Finder (MNF) is excellent keyword analysis software. For each niche, you get a list of similar and related keywords. For each keyword, you get local and global search count, Google search trends, exact phrase count, ad cost, online business intent, backlink measure, and SOC: strength of the competition. This parameter is crucial to correctly estimate the effort required to be successful with this keyword.

For a profitable micro-niche, you need phrases with high search volume (lots of people searching for this word) and weak competition (small number of pages related to it). The search volume needs no further explanation. It is the number of monthly searches. More searches mean more potential visitors, more visitors means higher chances to sell items or services. However, the number of pages related to your target keyword can be used to estimate the competition, but the number itself says little about the content on the competing pages. Fortunately, Micro Niche Finder provides an additional feature to estimate the strength of competition (SOC).

This SOC parameter is a simple number. If it’s below 50, it’s green, which means weak competition and little effort is needed to rank highly for this keyword. Higher SOC values ​​mean more effort is needed for higher ranking. If you click on this SOC number, you get three additional parameters: inanchor count, intitile count, and inurl count. These three parameters are directly related to the Google search operators, in fact, they are exactly the operators used in the search query. This way you get the number of pages where your target keyword is present in the anchor text of a link, in the page title or in the URL. The question is how is the Competition Strength parameter calculated?

Here’s the secret formula: The SOC parameter is the intersection of the pages with the three search operators. Simple as that. In other words, the parameter strength number shown in MNF is the number of pages that have the target keyword in the page title, URL, and anchor text at the same time. The MNF searches up to 1000 results. This is the actual query example for the keyword “long domain name”:

/search?num=100&hl=en&q=inanchor%3A%22long+domain+name%22+intitle%3A%22long+domain+name%22+inurl%3A%22long+domain+name%22&start=900&sa=N&filter=0

Caveat

This is a part of the Google search query URL, you need to enter it in the browser’s address bar after http://www.google.com.

As you can see in the query parameters, the start number is 900 and the num parameter is set to 100 to get the actual number of intersecting pages up to 1000. The best way to test this formula is to enter the query in your browser and test it with your keywords.