Some search terms are incredibly competitive. That is, many, many sites are competing for the top positions. Other search terms are far less competitive. How can you tell just how competitive your search terms are? Let me show you a few ways to figure it out:-

- Search for your terms. This is not a terribly good method, but so commonly recommended I want to explain it. Go to Google and search for a few of your terms. For instance, search for personal injury lawyer.

- Search for your terms using quotation marks. Type search terms in quotation marks, like this: “personal injury lawyer.” This time Google searches for the exact phrase, and comes back with a different number. When I searched, it came back with 3,200,000, because Google ignores all the pages with the words scattered around the page, and returns only pages with the exact phrase.

Here’s the problem with these two techniques: While they show you how commonly used the words are, they don’t show you how well the pages are optimized. Remember, you’re not competing against every page with these terms; you’re really competing with pages that were “optimized” for the search engines.
There may be millions of pages with the term, but if none of them have been optimized, you can take your new-found SEO knowledge, create your own optimized pages, and have a good chance of ranking well. So here’s another quick technique I like to use — a simple way to get a feel for competitiveness in a few seconds. Search for a term, then scan down the page looking for the number of:-

- PPC ads on the page. If people are spending money on PPC ads, many are also probably spending money on SEO.

- Bold words on the page. You’ll also notice that Google bolds the words that you searched for; all the major search sites do this. Lots of bold words often mean well-optimized pages.

- Bold words in the links (page titles). Bold words in each page result’s link indicate that someone has been optimizing the pages; the links are the page titles. The more bold text you see as you scan down, the more competitive the search terms are likely to be:

- Complete phrases on the page. The more frequently you see the full phrase you searched for, the more competitive the terms are likely to be; if the search engine returns mostly pages with the words scattered around, it’s not very competitive.