Share your method of evaluating market competition for certain keywords or niche. How do you determine if there is a low competition, middle, high? Is there an exact method with concrete numbers or is this all highly approximately and comparetively?
MS is good and you could also get the SEO Quake add-on for Firefox and look at all the listings on the 1st page for your keyword.
traffictravis offers a free version and uses a 5 star system to measure competitiveness for a keyword
hehe.. I don't.. If I want it I'm going to rank for it! Spending my time with software or whatever looking at serps deciding if its to competitive is useless now of days. Its all competitive to some level. Long ago it was all the rage to go find "hidden gems". Since them days; me, friend, and many others have hand searched, auto botted our way into long tail heaven and turned most gems into SOS. Here is how I size up markets; in 2006 I launched Wordze. Why I launched it is because at the time there was WordTracker, and KeywordDiscovery that had their own data sources. Everything else was free tools scraping data from Yahoo results... I got my own data source, put it together in 30 days, and launched it using some press, and a pricing that was 30% cheaper than the rest. I made a killing over the time I owned it.. Sold it in 2009 to a new owner, and the rest is history. Think about competition as in who else is doing what you are doing and how you standout. Find your marketing edge, not some serp and you will make more money faster and better than any serp king. Plus with the right spin you can hit the serps at the same time as thousands of natural links roll in. Best Levi
I use a combination of google's free tool, Micro Niche Finder and Traffic Travis to evaluate keywords, competition and ad prices
You can use the highly acclaimed tool called Market Samurai for 'testing the waters' aka competition level for particular keywords in a niche. I think there is a trial version available also.