What Does Low Or High Keyword Competition Mean?

So when I search for say "red shoes" in google and I see near the top or where ever, google says

"About 194,000,000 results (0.30 seconds) " is that considered high or low competition. Or is this how its done or you gotta use some other tool besides google search

 

Ok, I'd analyze the first five results, see the keyword in the domain name or not, then know the page rank of them. If they are from the world's top sites or not "Like about.com" You can know if you can target this keyword on your new domain name by doing this. "About 194,000,000 results" this counter is nothing..

 

Searching in Google won't tell you anything and it really depends in what terms you want to know about high or low competition. SEO? Adwords competition? I assume SEO.

There are various ways to work it out - third party tools, your own investigation or you can make an educated guess using Google Awords Keyword Tool. If a keyword pays well (in Adsense), high Adwords competition and a good number of searches, e.g. 10000+/month, then the chances are it will have strong SEO competition. That doesn't mean keywords that don't pay well in Adsense haven't got high SEO competition, though. As long as a keyword can be monetised somehow and has enough searches, there's a chance of high SEO competition.

There are tools such as SEO Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool, or Traffic Travis can also do this, along with many others. However, I stopped using TT quite quickly and instead did the research manually (just a rough overview):

1. Choose my keyword(s), then do some further research using Google Keyword Tool (find additional keywords, get an idea of traffic, etc - make sure you choose Exact as the match type).
2. Search for them in Google and look to see if their are high authority sites in the results. (MozBar can help if you're not sure how to identify them.) I wouldn't focus on PageRank, as this is a number subject to change (and easy to manipulate), but instead the domain's authority, age and similar.
3. Review the URLs and on-page content - how focused and relevant are each towards the search term.
4. If it's a page full of very high authority results, then are there longer tail variations (or related) of the keyword to go after first? You can always build up to a main keyword from long tails.

The number of results is irrelevant, really, as they aren't even for that exact term (use quote marks - "" - to get exacts for the term instead). I recommend learning to use Google search operators and similar as they will help you research keywords. Start here:

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=136861
http://support.google.com/news/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=82477

This is just a basic guide. Have a search in Google for a more advance guide to analysing SEO competition. It's worth doing it manually, as you'll gain a better understanding of your competition, rather than relying upon automated tools (and really some of them produce strange results with their keyword rating).

 

You can use Google keywords tool and it'll tell you if that keyword consider as high or low competition one.

 

If you are talking about competition on the google adword tool then that is the advertisers competition for the keyword.. so a high competition can be a good thing..

If you are talking about the competition to get to the top of the SERPs then it can be a very bad thing!!

 

"About 194,000,000 results (0.30 seconds) " refers to the number of results Google was able to gather and how long it took. While this also means that there's about the same number of pages using that keyword, it doesn't mean that the same number is targeting the exact keyword you typed in. I suggest you use the Google Keyoword tool and use that to look at the keyword competition.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!

 

use google webmaster tool so you can easily research keyword and can find the competition of that keyword.

 

First of all, I use only google keyword tool to source keywords. I follow below criteria only and these works well in my SEO strategy.
Make a list of keywords that have search volume of 1000 - 8000 max. As mostly high search volume keywords are high competitive.
1) Search related keywords from adword tool
2) Check xxxxxx number of results "double quote" search in search engine, and less than 5 lac is preferred.
3) check the trend of keyword in google insight.
4) Check the page rank of top 10 listed sites in search engine..