Does anyone have a formula on how to determine how competitive a keyword is? For example if i was trying to decide which of the following terms i wanted to target ... big dog small dog What formula can or should i use to work out how competitive and worthwile each one is?
use traffic travis free edition, SEO analysis tool will tell you how the competition is going and even how hard is to rank.
I find the most accurate way of determining how competitiveness of a keyword is by looking at the first page of Google. Look at the links, pagerank, domain authority, and page authority.
I also follow same process but I use only top 10 results. It is manual method but I think it work and offer accurate result.
I'm the same as a couple of the people who have responded already, taking a manual approach to it. It may seem like going the long way around, but the truth of the matter is that it's the best way. It's more accurate than any other way and if you get into the habit it can be fairly easy to do quickly.
Some people like to look at the number of indexed pages for the keyword but I don't subscribe to that theory. I only look at the top 10 search results. Afterall, if you can beat those, you're probably gonna beat those not in the top 10 as well.
The REAL competition is allintitle, so: allintitle:your keyword This is the most accurate way to find out your true competition level.
Market Samurai, SeoQuake plugin and SEO Spyglass - these 3 are a killer kombo when deciding the competitiveness of a keyword. Also, I look on the first 10 results only.
