Search/Competition ratio

[PrettyPaws]

When you guys are doing some keyword research do you have any kind of ratio for the amount of searches per month versus the number of competing sites?

For example if Googles’ keyword tool (using UK and “exact” match) showed 12,000 searches per month and searching google.co.uk for “keyword” (in quotes) returned 50,000 matching pages would that be seen as a bad ratio? Similarly if there are twice as many searches per month as competition pages would that be seen as a good potential keyword?

I know it’s not an exact science but what would you term a good ratio if you could?

[Nixies]

Using the amount of matching pages as an indercation of competition isn't really accurate enought to be useful. All it is telling you is the amount of times it is mentioned on the interent not how much people are competing on it. What you really need to beat are the one on the first page.

A more accurate method is to actually look at how much people are bidding on in adwords. This should tell you how mcuh much the traffic is worth and therefore how much effort people will take to compete. But again this is not prefect.