I have danced around this issue, but have some specific questions relating to judging the "competitiveness" of a keyword. It has been brought up elsewhere on this forum that the standard way to judge the competitiveness of a keyword is to look at the pages returned for a keyword/kw search counts. nichebot tool is one tool that will do this automatically. Two questions. nichebot's keyword searches is based on Keyword Discovery, which looks at the results from 31 search engines (unlike DP's tool, which looks at google and overture). What is the opinion of this community - is it better to just weight google heavily, or something which returns searches from all over, a useful thing? Secondly, I have wondered for some time now. Say you return a keyword which is not very competitive - in nichebot, say, close to 0. But say the reason it isn't competitive is not because there aren't a lot of sites - there are millions - but because there are proportionately more searches for that word than for other words, for example, with less sites but even less searches. My question is this: is not the judging of "competitiveness" on this strict ratio flawed, because although the word is not competitive by the ratio, if there are millions of sites on page 1, and only 10 spots - will they not grab up all the searches that do exist, though these searches number in the millions as well? IN this case, would not the fact that millions of sites exist alone pretty much mean that all searches would be grabbed by those sites at the top of the heap, and one is better off judging "competitiveness" by simply looking at words with less sites existing for them? Or, am I missing something - do competitive-by-the-ratio words really mean that, in that there is more wealth to be spread and pages lower in the ranking can also stand to grab the fruit, because the fruit is so plentiful?
I reckon KEI and competitive analysis similar to this, where you take into account the no. of SERPs is total BS. This has nothing to do with how competitive a term is, merely how often a term is found on the web, and not how many webmasters are targetting that keyword phrase. A better method in my opinion is to look at the top 10 search engine results of Google. If you find all the pages returned have a Pagerank of 6 or higher, Good Luck That's damn competitive. If most of the pages are PR 4 or 5, or lower, you should stand a good chance with some good SEO.
Dcristo - I thought PR has nothing anymore to do with SERP(?). For instance, on one of my keywords, on page 1 of the google results, the PRs is all over the map - from 7 to 0, with zero being from an authority site, the AARP (its main page had 6, but the page which returned on position 9 for that keyword in google had 0 PR). Most have 5-7, though. Also, I would have thought that the number of pages returned for google is a measure of how many webmasters are targetting for that keyword - unless you're saying that most of those happen to incidentally include the word, and a better measure is how many are specifically optimizing for that keyword?
Pagerank is a function of backlinks.... PR 6 and higher pages have alot of good backlinks to them, which plays a large role in rankings. Yes