Niches / keywords - what does "competitive" mean?

[aakk9999]

In various posts we are refering to "a very competitive" or "highly competitive" niche / keyword, in fact it seems that many people here operate in what they call "very competitive niche".

There are also references to "low competition niche". I gather this means different thing to different people. So I am interested in your opinions - how do you define highly competitive, medium competitive and low competition niches?

Do you look at the number of searches only? If so, what are the numbers you consider? Or you take into account the number of results for a keyword, or a number of results with only allintitle & allinanchor? Or something else?

[tedster]

I commonly look at how many Adwords are triggered by the keyword, and then total searches as a secondary signal - because total searches can vary from total clicks by as much as 40%

[aakk9999]

Thanks on this tedster. But what I am also curious about are some numbers - just curious what others consider competitive or low competition.

E.g.
>50,000 exact searches / month = is presumably competitive?
around 2000 exact searches per month = low or medium?
< 500 searches = long tail target?

Just curious what others think as so many here say they work in "highly competitive niche" or mention what happened in ranking for their "highly competitive keyword".