Is there a rough gauge as to how "competitive" a particular keyword is within the grand scheme of things or is it all relative to the niche? Example: "free porn" is probably extremely competitive by anyones standards. Lets just say it get 1 million clicks a month. Then you have "Transformers", which we will say gets 1 million clicks a month also. Are they compared to to one another because they both get roughly the same amount of clicks or is the competitiveness determined by the niche of each keyword? If "competitive" is global, what would the scale be, is there a link with a table? I hear a lot about choosing less competitive keywords to start, but if we are using a global scale, that would be bad advice, no?
What you're describing here is the search volume of those keywords, not how competitive or not competitive they are. Competition is measured not in terms of popularity but in terms of the number (and quality) of websites competing for this particular keyword. I'm sure that both of your examples are exremely competitive (as are most keywords that have a large search volume) but so can be "yabbadabbadoobackyards" (probably 0 to 1 searches a month) if 20 sites would suddenly decide to start actively targeting this keyword. Your job is to find keywords that: - have a large search volume (such as your examples) - are not very competitive, i.e. don't have many websites targeting those keywords Finding such is definitely not an easy task but very doable.
Thank you for clarifying the terminology for me. So my next question is, are you sandboxed based on volume or competitiveness?