What makes a highly competitive keyword anyway?

[seochump]

Hello guys, so I'm still wet behind the ears and am currently reading SEO an Hour a Day, as well as going through the Moz tutorial. But I do have a question that's been confusing me a bit.

I've been doing keyword research here and there and I will get a "Highly Competitive" keyword (61%) at times. So then I try to go through each of the top 10 pages to see the anchors that they've used and how many backlinks there are to that page.

A lot of the times the page with have 0 backlinks and a very low page authority (like 1) but it will still rank in 2, or 3. So what exactly makes it competitive? I know I must be missing something super simple here! Maybe I'm not accurately assessing the anchor/backlinks to that specific keyword.

I use backlinkwatch, opensite explorer and the keyword difficulty report.

Thanks guys!

[seochump]

Thank you two for the answers but I didn't realize one simple thing. The google adword tool is mainly for well....Adwords. The keywords are probably highly competitive in terms of CPC and the number of people vying for them. I was doing organic ranking research. This is why I was confused as to why the keywords were "highly competitive" but an opensite analysis of the top 10 would show that they had very little page authority or good if at all backlinks. The sites that would show up would be the manufactorers or an ebay page or something like that!

[peterlaurent]

I'm not exactly sure how you are defining "Highly Competitive", I think you are missing something critical here, if a keyword is truly competitive i.e. "cheap flights", "credit cards", "domain registration" or "business opportunities" then this would not be the case.

Typically I would look at these things in the following order:

1. Look at how many people are searching for the keyword each month using a variety of tools (HitWise, Google Keyword Tool, SEMRush, Wordtracker etc)
2. Looking at the number of advertisers and the bid price on the keyword
3. Look at the PR, TrustRank, MozRank etc of the top ranking sites
4. Looking at the site structure of on page factors
5. Looking at backlink profile

By doing these five things I usually have a fairly good idea of how to compete i.e. on page relevancy or back link profile

[Michael-Goode]

Hi seochump,

There are 2 reasons I can think of the top of my head. First of all sofware such as OSE can take a while to crawl (and find) websites, before finding out what backlinks are pointing to it. Due to this, it may appear that some sites have 0 backlinks to it, while in reality it could have lots. You mentioned, that a lot of times the page has a page authority of 1, usually means (to me anyway) that OSE hasn't picked the site up yet.

Secondly, I have noticed while working for several clients, that whenever a new site comes up, it "could" shoot up to the top of the rankings, before it being dropped off to several pages. New sites come and go onto the first page rather quickly. So perhaps it could be that.