Is It Worth Competing? Reading the Results Page Before Investing in a Topic

Every keyword tool assigns a difficulty number, and every experienced practitioner ignores it. Not because the number is wrong, but because it answers a question that is too general — how hard is this on average, for anyone — when the useful question is whether this particular site, with these particular resources, can realistically take a position on this particular page of results.

That question is answered by looking. This article is a method for reading a results page systematically using the Semalt platform to gather the supporting data, so that the assessment takes five minutes rather than being either a guess or an afternoon.

Why a difficulty score is not enough

Difficulty scores are typically derived from the link profiles of the ranking pages. That captures one dimension of competition and misses several that matter more in practice.

A term can carry a low difficulty score and be unwinnable because every result is a marketplace listing. A term can carry a high score and be very winnable because the incumbents are old, thin pages that nobody has updated in four years.

Working parameters from the assessment described below.

The five-minute assessment

1. Look at the shape of the page

   Before reading any result, note what occupies the space: ads, a map block, an answer box, video carousels, shopping units. Count how many classic organic results remain above the fold. That number is your realistic ceiling, not "position one".

2. Identify the dominant format

   Are the ranking pages guides, product pages, comparisons, tools, videos, forum threads? Whatever format dominates is what the engine has decided satisfies this query. Producing a different format is a bet against that evidence, and it usually loses.

   We cover this in detail in Generating Pages at Scale Without Producing Junk.

3. Classify the players

   Marketplaces, national media and aggregators mean structural difficulty regardless of your quality. Small competitors, forums and outdated pages mean opportunity. Two or three heavyweights plus five ordinary sites means you are competing for positions four to eight, which is often fine.

4. Open the top three

   Actually read them. How thorough are they? When were they published? Do they answer the question directly or circle it? This is where most opportunity is discovered, and it cannot be done from a table of metrics.

5. Decide and write down why

   One line: pursue, pursue later, or skip, with the reason. The reason matters because in six months somebody will suggest the term again and the note prevents repeating the analysis.

Reading the incumbents

Once you are looking at the actual pages rather than their metrics, four observations do most of the work.

The last item on the right is worth a sentence, because it comes up constantly in proposals. Ranking for a competitor's brand name is occasionally possible via comparison content, but the traffic converts poorly and the effort is better spent almost anywhere else. It looks aggressive in a strategy document and rarely pays.

Counting the positions that actually exist

Standard reporting assumes ten organic results. Many commercial queries no longer have ten above any reasonable scroll depth — paid results, a map block, an answer panel and a related-questions section can push the first classic result far down the page.

This matters for forecasting more than for strategy. If you model traffic assuming position three earns a typical click share, and position three on this query sits below three ads and a map block, your forecast will be substantially wrong and the client will remember the number.

The practical adjustment is to record which features appear on each tracked term and to discount expected click share on the terms that carry heavy blocks. It is a small refinement that prevents the specific failure of hitting the target position and missing the traffic estimate — which is the most awkward outcome to explain, because technically everything worked.

Turning one-off assessments into monitoring

A results page is not a fixed object. The assessment you make today describes today, and the pages that matter most to your business are precisely the ones most likely to change, because they are commercially valuable enough for platforms to build features around.

See also: SEO for SaaS and Startups.

This is where recording features alongside positions pays for itself. When a tracked term gains a shopping unit or an answer panel, the position may not move at all while the traffic quietly halves. Without the feature record, that shows up months later as an unexplained decline, and the investigation starts from the wrong hypothesis — usually "did we lose rankings", which the data says you did not.

Three patterns are worth watching for specifically. A new answer block on an informational term generally means the query has lost most of its click value permanently, and the sensible response is to shift effort rather than to optimise harder. A new shopping or listing unit on a commercial term means the platform is monetising it, and the organic ceiling has dropped — worth knowing before setting next quarter's targets. And a change in the dominant format, where written guides give way to videos or tools, means your page type has stopped matching the query, which is a content decision rather than an optimisation one.

Set the review cadence to quarterly for the commercial set. It takes under an hour, it catches the changes that silently invalidate a plan, and it is the difference between reporting "the query changed shape in March" and reporting "we are not sure what happened".

Building a portfolio rather than picking winners

Assessing individual terms well leads naturally to the more useful question: what mix should the plan contain?

A workable portfolio has three tiers. Quick wins where you already rank eight to twenty and the incumbents are beatable, which produce visible movement in weeks and buy patience. Core commercial terms where you are competing on merit against comparable sites, which is where the real value sits and where results take months. And a small number of ambitious terms you probably will not win this year but which set the direction for content that compounds.

The proportions matter. All quick wins produces a chart that rises and revenue that does not. All ambitious terms produces six months with nothing to show and a cancelled engagement. Roughly half core, a third quick wins, the rest ambitious, is a mix that survives contact with a budget review.

The Portuguese-language results page

Two observations specific to working in Portuguese, both of which affect the assessment.

First, results pages here are frequently less saturated. The same commercial query that would face ten thorough competitors in English often faces three or four in Portuguese, with the rest of page one filled by aggregators, thin pages or partial translations. That makes the "read the top three" step more valuable, not less — the opportunity is genuinely visible more often.

Second, mixed-language results are common. Portuguese queries sometimes return English pages, particularly in technical and B2B areas, which tells you something useful: nobody has written the Portuguese answer properly. That is one of the clearest opportunity signals available in this market, and it is invisible to any difficulty score.

Making it a habit

The assessment above takes five minutes per term once you know what you are looking at. For a plan of twenty target terms, that is under two hours, and it is the two hours that determines whether the next six months of content work lands or bounces.

Skip it and the alternative is choosing targets by volume and difficulty score, which is how sites end up with well-written pages competing against video carousels and marketplace listings.

If you have a target list that was never checked against actual results pages, that is the exercise worth doing this week. Open the dashboard, look at which features appear on your tracked terms, and start the assessment with the ones carrying the heaviest blocks — those are where forecasts go wrong first.