KEI questions: is this too competitive?

[kool002]

my KEI =
50,000(monthly searches)/700,000(competing pages)

is it too competitive, less competive, should I go for it? what am I dealing with?

[dbrennan]

Are there any sponsored links?
If there are, then someone is making money. If not, it's either wide open and test test and more testing or, it's just not profitable hence no sponsored links, is my opinion...

[kool002]

I was asking about should I start the SEO effort for this keyword? is it too competitive?

[Receptional Andy]

How are you measuring the monthly searches and competing pages? If your measurements are not reliable, then clearly this will not be able to inform your SEO efforts.

700,000 doesn't seem like an insurmountable task - unless you are using phrase or title matching. These are simple searches that are better than just a default search to estimate competition, e.g.

intitle:"green widgets" [google.co.uk]

Pages mentioning the keywords (in sequence) within the title of their pages can reasonably be seen as competing. Although this doesn't take into account the many factors affecting the performance of those URLs - they could all be very poorly optimised.

Of course, next to nothing is too competitive, other than popular brand names and the like - it depends on your site, and how effective you think you are at SEO.

[cabowabo]

I didn't think KEI was used anymore. I like going by the inanchor, intitle and intext operators to see how well the Top Ten has been optimized for SEO. My experience has been that for the most part, most good search terms, regardless of number of pages in the index, have not been fully SEO'd, therefore, there is room to compete.

[InternetDominus]

50,000 monthly searches and only 700,000 competing pages. That is really hot keyword, and of course you should optimize for it.

However, check first how many sites are already optimizing for it.

If you see that the first 50 pages have the keyword on their titles, descriptions, urls, shown on SERP, you will have a hard time SEOing, but if you see that listing are showing keywords in titles, others in descriptions, and others in urls, it means not many people have discovered that keyword for optimization, and you should start doing it.

[nealrodriguez]

you should then take keywords for which you think your site can rank, and perform backlink analysis of the top 10 sites ranked for those keywords. take an average of their backlinks, and you'll get a better idea of how competitive the keywords are.

[Death of the Man]

My ideas have been touched on, but not exactly.

I have been using these figures for my niches:

allintitle:blue widget

and

phrase (not broad) for the Adwords Keyword Tool, and look at the avg. monthly, not last month (which is an [exact] number)

The site I'm working on most has a Searches/allintitle ratio of 4.2; average CPC of $14; 4,400 searches per month.

It's dominated by big retailers like Walmart and big niche-specific retailers. It's all just multiple product pages so I think I can get in there by offering a little more substance and having some inbound links. (Many of the retailers' pages which show up on Page 1 have 0 inbound links.)

Sorry didn't mean to go off about my own specifics but I think we're in the same boat.

[nealrodriguez]

$14 cpc makes it very attractive, and possible very competitive. you may want to try an 'intitle:' and 'inanchor:' query simultaneously; that should give you a good idea as to who is seriously optimizing with links and titles. also ensure that you are checking all the links pointing to the domains of those pages; ensure you are not just checking for backlinks pointing to the pages.

[Death of the Man]

Links to these domains is humungous (sp?). For example: Walmart Blue Widgets Page will have 0 links to the page, but around 1,000,000 to the domain as a whole (Walmart.com).

Am hoping Google will favor me over the big boys based on my more fleshed out content and relevant links including anchors.