I use Market Samurai to check the top 10 competitors. Here are the the metrics I look at and take into consideration evaluating the strength of competition. Next to the stat, there's number on the 0-10 scale. This is my way of showing you how important I think every metric is (the higher the number, the more important the SEO factor is):

Off-Page Factors:

Domain Age - 6/10
PR - 3/10
Google Index Count - 3/10
Referring Domains - 7/10
Page Backlinks - 10/10
Domain Backlinks - 5/10
Page - -edu/.gov Backlinks 3/10 (Many people will disagree, but I think it's a myth )
DMOZ Directory - 2/10
Yahoo Directory - 2/10

On-Page factors:

Keyword In Title: 9/10
Key In URL - 7/10
Keyword In Description - 1/10
Keyword In Header Tag - depends on where in the header tag, if H1 - 7/10
Google Cache Age - 1/10

This is just my personal way of assessing the competition for the keywords I'm after. Hope it helps to some extent

- Trev

Keep it really simple, if you see a lot of root domain on the top 10, forget about it. If you see a lot of inner page which are poorly optimized, register an EMD or EMD with addition text and you will see it will rank quite easily.

To get to know which keyword is easy to rank, I usually check competitive strength shown by Google external keyword tool (Low,Medium or High etc) - Apart from that, I usually check the backlinks + quality of content (keyword density, number of words etc) for the sites which are on top 10 for the keyword.

To be honest I've become pretty comfortable with the serpIQ scores. They're fairly accurate when it comes to determining complexity/effort needed for a term.

There are several tools with their own "Competition Algorithm". You should really look into the Warrior Special Offers for a keyword tool.

It's really, really simple. Let your tools do the work

1. Open your traffic travis (heres the link) Note: do not upgrade to 4.0!
2. Scroll down to SEO Analysis
3. Put in your key word
4. Chose analysis 10 (in lieu of 20)
5. Press "Analysis"
6. Read the difficult rating. I always chose "relatitively easy" if not go to the next key word.

all should take less than a minute!

arnold55
mike reynolds

Keyword suggestion tools will definitely help you have a general idea about the keywords you are to choose and how competitive they are. For example, when you access AdWords panel and enter some terms, the monthly search numbers, although might not be 100% accurate sometimes, but the figures will help you having an opinion on how competitive or easy the terms are and then you can prepare additional keywords and long-tail phrases to target via your site.

Even when you manually search Google and enter some terms, the number of domains listed will help you figure out how the niches are online. Apparently, the ones which reflect millions of records and pages tend to be more competitive than the ones which involve only hundreds or a few thousand records. If your primary keywords are just too competitive, the solution could be trying to move towards long-tail phrases which in most cases are easier to reach and target.

Hi Jeff,

Your criteria seems to be OK for the keyword research.However you can use some more advanced tool like keywordcountry.com to help you out.
It will not only gives you access to keyword research but also support you for SEO strategy and 12 plus internet marketing tools which are rarely found anywhere else on web.