Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Ryan

Glad you asked! Our competition formula uses

• On Site Factors (Keyword in Title, Description, URL, ...?) 
  -> is the page actually trying to rank for the term
• Page Competition Data (PA)
• Domain Competition Data (DA)

I agree 100% with your example of a Wiki Page, that's why the DA part of the formula has only a very small influence on our competition value in comparison to the PA part.

The reason why results 1-3 may show a lower competition average than 8-10, is because Google sometimes shows results, which don't appear competitive according to SEOmoz (eg. Videos, News, etc...) -> that's why we recently changed the default view in SECockpit to show the average competition over results 1-10.

Don't hesitate to ask anything else!

Hi Gil

This is Sam from SwissMadeMarketing - I'm the main developer of SECockpit - so I hope you don't mind me joining the conversation

I think we all agree that to determine the competition for a keyword, we need to look at what's ranking in the Top 10 positions on Google and get good data (preferably from SEOmoz

Unfortunately, many Keyword Tools use the "No. of Competing Pages" figure to determine competition - which is a pretty useless number for many reasons (we explain why here: http://swissmademarketing.com/secockpit/launch-2-rpdl-23fb6/)

Fortunately, there are keyword tools - eg. Market Samurai - which allow you to do a proper competition analysis for a keyword - this means, scraping the Top 10 results from Google, getting the Google Page Rank of the Page & Domain, etc, etc.

The bad news is, doing this for ONE keyword in Market Samurai takes you around 1-2 mins. So, what do you do with a list of 100 or more keyword ideas? Waste hours and days? I don't think so.

This is where the real power of SECockpit lies. We've built a Server Farm, which can get the entire competition data for about 200 keywords a minute. This includes:

• Search Volume / CPC data from Google Keyword Tool
• Top 10 Ranking Results from Google Search
• SEOmoz Information for every URL (mozRank, Page Auth, Domain Auth, Backlinks, etc)
  (- we even get additional information like free Exact Match Domains)

We then crunch all that data into a simple 0-100 competition value (similar to the "difficulty" value shown in the SEOmoz Keyword Tool).

This means, with SECockpit, you can order large lists of keywords by their "real" difficulty within minutes.

Look forward to any questions you may have

Cheers,
Sam