Is the SEOTCR really that important in judging competitiveness?

[Calamaroo]

SEOC - SEO Competition - The total number of webpages that mention a specific keyword term, in the same (phrase) word order, in Google's index.

SEOTC - SEO Title Competition - The total number of webpages that mention all of the words in a keyword term in the title of the page.

SEOTCR - SEO Title Competition to SEO Competition Ratio - This is the ratio of SEOTC to SEOC. A low score can indicate weak competition in a market.

Is the SEOTCR really that important in determining the difficulty of getting to page one of Google? Is this really a good indicator of competitiveness?

Or are there better ways of gauging the strength of competition and thus one's ability to get ranked?

Or am I better just looking at things like (referring to those sites already on page one) pagerank, age, total backlinks to a page, total backlinks to a site as a whole, their title/description/H1 tags, Yahoo directory and DMOZ submission, etc.?

[Vincenzo Oliva]

I don't use that because I believe it's misleading. You can have a favorable SEOCR with a SEOTC of 50k if you have a SEOC of 1-2 million+ that does not make it any easier to rank with 50k SEOTC competitors.

My point of view is that your competition is not the 350k competing pages but the 10 on page one that are my obstacles.

[Fraggler]

Yeah, focus on your top 10...but make sure you can beat site #1 too!

I put my main focus on the PageRank and Backlinks (to the page). I have great success targeting keywords with the top 10 full or pages with PR < 3 and BLP < 20. Easy pickings to get your website started.