Chapter 3: The allintitle Test and the Winning Formula

Chapter 2 built your candidate list. It is probably long, optimistic, and mostly wrong — not because the keywords are bad, but because most keywords are unwinnable for a small store right now. This chapter is the filter. It contains the method's best-known technique, its most misquoted number, and an honest explanation of what that number does and does not mean.

What allintitle Actually Does

allintitle: is a real Google search operator. Type this into Google:

allintitle: extra thick yoga mat for bad knees

and Google returns only pages whose title tag contains all of those words. The number Google reports ("About X results") is a count — a rough count, and we will come back to that — of pages that were deliberately built to target that exact phrase or something very close to it. In other words, it approximates the number of pages competing on purpose for your keyword.

That distinction matters. A keyword can have millions of total results, but if only a handful of pages have the phrase in their title, most of those millions are incidental mentions — pages Google ranked by accident, which a focused page can usually displace. Conversely, a keyword with a modest total result count but thousands of allintitle results is a keyword thousands of SEOs have already targeted deliberately. You would be joining the back of a long, professional queue.

The Threshold — and the Honest Truth About It

The source course's rule, as promoted for the eCommerce course, is:

If allintitle: returns fewer than 50 results, treat the keyword as low-competition and a candidate for your store.

In another of Ali's public lessons — his teaching on ranking without backlinks — the same check is taught with a looser line: results under 100 mean "you can rank with ease," demonstrated with an example that returned 63 results. This book gives you both numbers rather than pretending they are one, and here is how to use them sensibly:

Under 50: the course's green zone for a small or new store. Very few pages target this phrase deliberately. Prioritize these.
50–100: the yellow zone. Still few deliberate competitors; winnable if the other signals in this chapter agree and your page is genuinely the best result. Ali's own demonstration keyword (63 results) sat here.
Over 100: deliberate competition is real. Not impossible — but no longer a "low-competition first" keyword for a small store. Park it for later, when your site is stronger.

Now the honesty, because this threshold is the most abused idea in this entire area of SEO:

The <50 rule is a practitioner heuristic, not a Google rule. Google has never published, endorsed, or hinted at any allintitle threshold. The idea belongs to a family of practitioner techniques — the best known being the "Keyword Golden Ratio" popularized by Doug Cunnington, which divides the allintitle count by the keyword's monthly search volume and treats a ratio under 0.25 as promising. Ali's flat "<50 results" is a simpler, blunter version of the same instinct: few deliberate competitors + real searches = an opening.

Three limitations you must know before trusting any allintitle number:

Google's result counts are estimates. The "About X results" figure is famously unstable — it can change between refreshes, between locations, and as you page deeper into results (where the count often collapses). Treat 40 and 60 as the same reading: "few dozen." Never make a decision on the difference between 47 and 53.
A low count says nothing about the strength of the few. Forty results could still include Amazon, Wikipedia, and three superb specialist stores. That is why this chapter pairs the count with a manual inspection of who is actually ranking (below). The count tells you how many; only your eyes tell you how strong.
A low count can also mean no market. A phrase nobody targets might be a phrase nobody searches. The check only means anything when Chapter 2 has already confirmed real volume and a real CPC. allintitle is the second filter, never the first.

Used with those limits understood, the test is genuinely valuable — it is fast, free, and surprisingly effective at finding the neglected corners of a market. Used as a magic number, it will waste your time. The rest of this chapter is the difference.

The Winning Formula: Four Signals, Not One

In his "lessons from my biggest mistakes" teaching, Ali presents what he calls the Winning Formula — the four signals he checks before committing to a keyword. Notice that the allintitle count is only one of the four:

A low-authority site sits in the top 5. Open the results for your keyword (a normal search, not allintitle). If one of the top-5 pages belongs to a small, weak-looking site — low Domain Rating in Ahrefs terms (there is a free Ahrefs authority checker, and browser extensions show similar metrics), a thin little store or blog that looks like a one-person operation — that is the single most encouraging sight in SEO. It proves Google will rank a site like yours for this term. If a DR-7 blog can sit at position 4, the door is open.
Irrelevant results are ranking. If some top-10 results only loosely match the search — a general article ranking for a buying phrase, a page about a neighboring product — Google is showing you it lacks enough good, on-target pages. A precisely targeted page is exactly what it is waiting for.
Old, stale pages are holding positions. A top result that hasn't been updated in years, with dated design and dead information, is a placeholder, not a champion. Fresh, current, complete content displaces placeholders.
The allintitle count is low — under 50 ideally, under 100 acceptably, per the rule above.

Score your candidates honestly: three or four signals = a priority keyword. Two = a maybe, queued behind the priorities. One or none = park it, however much you like the phrase. And note the lesson Ali attaches to this from his own early career: he spent roughly two years chasing a ~7,200-search keyword against entrenched competition and got nothing for it. The formula exists because he paid for the knowledge. You get it for the price of this book — don't re-buy it with your own two years.

The Counterintuitive Corollary: Small Is Not an Insult

The same teaching makes a point that offends beginners and enriches professionals: a keyword with 50 searches a month can be an excellent target — if the four signals say it is easy and the CPC says those searchers buy.

Do the arithmetic the way Chapter 2 taught you. Fifty monthly searches, a top-3 position capturing perhaps a third of the clicks, a store conversion rate of a few percent: that's a sale or two a month from one small page. Trivial — until you multiply by the thirty or fifty such pages this method has you build across a catalog. Stores are not blogs: your traffic is the sum of hundreds of small, winnable searches, each attached to something you sell. The giant head terms are the garnish you may earn later. The long tail is the meal.

This is also why the hyper-specific version of the method works for local and niche sellers: "plumber in Lahore" is a war; a neighborhood-level or specification-level phrase is a skirmish you can actually win, and the people typing it are usually the closest to paying. Specificity shrinks the crowd and raises the intent at the same time.

Running the Filter: Your Workflow

For each candidate keyword from Chapter 2:

Confirm volume exists and CPC is real (Chapter 2's spreadsheet). No volume or no CPC → delete or demote.
Run allintitle:"your exact phrase" on Google (quotes optional; the operator works on the words that follow it). Record the count.
Run the plain search. Spend two full minutes looking at the top 10: Who are they? Any small sites in the top 5? Any irrelevant results? Any fossils?
Score the four signals. Write the score in the spreadsheet.
Sort your list: priority keywords (3–4 signals, allintitle <50) first, then maybes (2 signals, or allintitle 50–100), then park the rest without guilt.

A practical warning from experience: do this filtering in a single focused session per category, and cap your priority list. Ten priority keywords you actually build pages for beat a hundred you admire in a spreadsheet. Chapter 4 takes your priority list and assigns each keyword to exactly one page — the step that turns research into a site plan.

Chapter 3 Action Checklist

[ ] For every candidate keyword, record the allintitle: count in your spreadsheet.
[ ] Manually inspect the top 10 results for each serious candidate (small sites? irrelevant results? stale pages?).
[ ] Score each candidate against the four Winning Formula signals.
[ ] Classify: Priority (<50 allintitle + 3–4 signals), Maybe (50–100 or 2 signals), Parked (the rest).
[ ] Delete zero-volume/zero-CPC phrases the filter exposes as empty.
[ ] Write the heuristic warning on the top of your sheet: "Counts are estimates. Thresholds are rules of thumb. Eyes on the actual results decide."