"competitive" terms/phrases

what exactly is the borderline for becoming a "competitive" term?

in google specifically?

our phrase has 5,750,000 (we're #21 at the moment, going up though) results on google. is that competitive as far as plain results go? do they measure it some other way?

 

How many pages returned is not really a good guide to how competitive a term is. To find out how many people are competing (actually targeting the phrase) your best looking at a couple of things. First hit the allintitle: your phrase this will tell you how many pages have those words in their title. Next refine it to allintitle:"your phrase" this will tell you how many people are targetting not only those words, but those words as an exact phrase!

Finally try allinanchor:your phrase and take a look at how many backlinks the top sites have. Not absolute, and thrown together quickly, as I am off to catch a train to SES London soon, but it will give you a better idea of pages actually competing, over pages using the phrase.

 

To find sites serious about their SEO try:

intitle:"phrase" inanchor:"phrase"

Cheers

James

 

You should look at how many times these phrases are searched a day also.
Overture has a search suggestion tool, and you can use spellweb to compare 2 phrases to see which one is more popular on Google.

 

In terms of meauring competion. I use a different approach. I like to measure the off page metrics of the sites that rank in the SERPS for keywords I wish to rank for.