Nov 12, 2026 · From the book eCommerce SEO That Ranks
The allintitle Test: Know in 60 Seconds Whether a Keyword Is Winnable
Most keyword tools tell you how many people search a phrase. Almost none tell you the thing you actually need to know: how many pages are deliberately competing for it. That is the gap the allintitle: test fills — for free, in under a minute.
What the test is
allintitle: is a real Google search operator. Type it in front of a keyword:
allintitle: extra thick yoga mat for bad knees
Google returns only the pages that carry every word of that phrase in their title tag. A page with all your words in its title is a page that was built — on purpose — to rank for that keyword. So the result count is a rough census of your deliberate competition.
The rule of thumb
The heuristic taught in the course this blog follows, and used throughout the book: if allintitle: returns fewer than about 50 results, treat the keyword as low-competition and a genuine candidate for a small store. Hundreds or thousands of results means established stores have already claimed that ground.
Say the quiet part out loud: this is a practitioner heuristic, not a Google rule. Google publishes no such threshold. Counts move, they vary by location and by the day, and a low count says nothing about how strong the few competing pages are. That is why the book pairs the test with three further signals — the Winning Formula — before committing to anything: search volume worth having, buyer intent, and a page you can actually build better than what is ranking.
How to run it well
- Test exact phrases a buyer would type, not broad head terms. Nobody wins "yoga mat"; somebody wins "extra thick yoga mat for bad knees."
- Run the test on your whole candidate list and sort by the count — your content calendar writes itself from the low end.
- Re-check before you build the page, not after. Sixty seconds now saves six hours of writing into a wall.
The honest bottom line
The allintitle test does not find you traffic and it does not rank anything. It stops you wasting effort on keywords you were never going to win, and points your effort at the ones you might. In SEO for small stores, that sorting decision is most of the game.
This post condenses Chapter 3 of the book. The full chapter — including the complete Winning Formula and how the scores are recorded — is free here: Chapter 3: The allintitle Test
