how competitive is the keyword Los Angeles dentist? and how can one know if the keyword is competitive. In what grounds does one check
try to search for that kw.. then the number of results is one that you can check how many website who use that kw..
In reality, the raw figure of how many results are returned is pretty meaningless. What you need to pay attention to is how many pages/results in , it's being used as a page title and in urls - that's the sites that are actively targeting it.
I search a word with quotes around it first. Than I search without quotes. The first way will tell you how many sites your competing with the second will tell you which sites you will be competing with for the first page. Go to each site and check the page rank of the site. I use a fire fox odd on to do that. I most of them are low pr than it won't be too difficult to outrank them. This site has som more info on selecting a keyword.
You can check it by typing the word in adwords and select the exact match for your site. Los Angeles dentist is definetely a competitve phrase.
If that phrase proves to be too competitive try using variations of it like LA Dentist, Dentist in Los Angeles, or Los Angeles CA Dentist.
Enter the phrase in Google search bar with quotation marks around it (i.e. "Los Angeles Dentist") to see how many sites are targeting those words in that order, then put - allintitle:"Los Angeles Dentist" in the search bar to see how many sites actually have it in their title. Good luck, Ray