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Google offers a Keyword application that allows me to see the number of time a particular query has been made in Google.

There is a column in the results named "Competition" (Actually its Concurrence in French, I'm just translating). Its a rating from 0 to 1, as in percentage. What indicator is that?

EDIT *

Is this something useful I should rely on? I'm not sure about how to interpret this data. Should I go for less competitive keywords with a lower number of searches or not worry about it and go for the highly searched keywords anyway? Is 50% considered high? what about 75% ?

I have a very niche market that sell expensive offline services, so the very long tail is my goal (I assume). If you didn't already figured out, I'm very new to SEO =)

4 Answers 4

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I find that the competition value is useful as a means for seeing how important other advertisers consider the term to be, however, it is not as important as specificity (how closely the term aligns with whatever you happen to be marketing) and search volume (how many people are searching on the term).

Note that many, many PPC advertisers take the "shotgun approach" to advertising: they buy up all kinds of related terms and (perhaps to their surprise) the tendency is to artificially inflate the PPC value of terms which do not convert customers particularly well.

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From the "About this data" link on the Keyword tool:

Competition

The image represents the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google.

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Competition: The number of advertisers worldwide bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. The rating represents a general low-to-high guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword.

So one thing is clear here that that competition count is more dependent for advertisers. But the beauty is that the same concept get applied if you take those keyword to optimize you website for.

So it's worth to fight fro the low competition keyword with minimum searches.

Hope that helps. Thanks!

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The competition in the Adwords Tool is not an indication of the amount of webmaster competing for that keyword in search rankings. Its rather a measure of the advertisers who are competing for that keyword in Adwords.

In case you are opting for a website to earn revenue through Adsense, I suggest you pick your keywords as ones with high competition.

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