Noob question relating to adsense and keyword research

Hey guys...just trying to learn more about internet marketing and I have a question.
When doing keyword research I see that most all guides tell you to find keywords with low competition instead of medium or high.
If a keyword does have low competition doesn't this mean that there aren't many people displaying ads for the keyword?
Meaning google would have to show a random ad instead of a targeted one if enough aren't available?

Correct me if I'm wrong...I need all the help I can get.

Morbidthreat,

Competition everyone is talking about is not the competition you find in the keyword tool. You are right to say that if you go for a keyword with low competition there you probably won't get ads directly related to the keyword you are working for.

Competiton is the website you find on the first page of google for your keyword. Some look at first page but I prefer to look at the top 3 websites. This is where you will get traffic so unless you are going for a keyword with a lot of search each month it is better to aim for top 3.

There are many way and tools to analyse the competition for your keyword. You can download traffictravis for free. This is a great tool to get started and you won't have to spend any money to get it. Look at how many backlinks the top 3 websites have, domain age.

Some tips I can give you:

-Don't go crazy about exact match domains. You may find amazing niches with low competition and very high commercial intent which will bring you great results. My best sites don't have EMD and perform well.

-The number of page with inurl: and between " " doesn't mean anything. You can find very competive keyword with extremely low "keyword" and low competition keyword with millions of results.

If you can spend $50 get Ultimate niche finder. The creator of the tool have a sales thread here and the tool is really great and will help to find great keywords.

Good luck !

Adwords: Used to find keywords and the volume of traffic that they receive as well as any possible values of those keywords. For example it would show that ranking for "car insurance" has a much higher cost per click than "small green widget in Idaho".

Use AdWords to create your shortlist.

Google / Market Samurai: Look at the first page of results for your keyword, this is your "competition".

Thanks, that answered my question perfectly. I am currently using Traffic Travis and find it to be very useful so far.

Thanks, I've got the basics down. I was just confused with the use of the word competition. The only problem I'm having now is finding a good niche. I've searched for 100s of keywords with good results. :/ I'm using local monthly > 1000, CPC > $1.00, Lang = English, and Competition = High/Med as my filters.

If you're trying to make money with Adsense, a high Adwords competition and low SEO competition is ideal. However, they generally are in relation. SEO and PPC are 2 ways of driving traffic to your website, and if one is less competition than the other, then webmasters will use the one with less competition, which causes them to even out and generally be equal.