What is considered a competitive keyword

Term is often used, but never defined

[lgn1]

With regard to SEO, I always hear that its very difficult to get top positions in the search engine for competitive keywords.

I know that terms like real estate and travel get over 180 million search results in google, and thus are competitive, but what is considered the cutoff.

Im in a niche market in my keywords average 2-3 million search results for google. Would this be considered low or medium competitive.

I have been trying since Florida 'when we went from the top 5 search results' to page 10 or worse. I have used every white-hat SEO technique, and guidelines in the book, and I have barely moved.

Maybe 2-3 million search results is considered highly competitive, and im just banging my head against the wall.

Anybody in the industry can define

highly competitive
medium conpetitive
low competitive

in Qualatative (measurable) terms?

[claus]

When I personally use the term I don't think about how many results a search will produce. It is more or less irrelevant if there are 100 or 100K results.

What is relevant, IMHO, is the percentage of heavily SEO'ed pages in the top 20.

I should add that lack of competition does not mean that there are easy money to be made. It could very well be that there is little or no competition because the area isn't profitable.

On the other hand, very competitive areas are not easily turned into profits because there are so many competitors.

[edited by: claus at 5:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2006]

[Alex_Miles]

Personally I think its any keyword my competition rank higher than me for :)

Or you could look at Oversure data and call it any keyword over $10.