Competitiveness of a Keyphrase: Is it Less Important?

[ADAM Web Design]

In doing a summary check of sorts to see if some clients' websites were listed on The Big 3, I've come across a rather interesting behaviour that I don't think has fully been accounted for when people speak of grabbing "competitive" keywords and phrases.

See the examples below:

http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid...esource+centre . sustainabilityincubator.com, a site under construction, is ranked #5 out of 34,200,000. (Yes, I know exactly why it is, so I'm not looking for an answer for this.)

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=ut...DAM+Web+Design (my company, ranked #2 out of 23,000,000).

http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/resul...ival&FORM=QBRE (greenbuildingfest.com , ranked #1 out of almost 5,500,000).

In all three of these examples, the keyphrase contains a large number of results. And in all cases, through the things i've done, I've attained a top 5 ranking.

Buuuuuuuuuut...I don't think anyone would be looking for the sites I mentioned under any of these phrases. And I'm okay with that. (Well, I'd like for them to, but would understand why they wouldn't.)

The question that I have is this: have we passed the point where examining the competitiveness of a keyphrase in terms of its results is overrated? Even the KEI takes the number of results into account, although it is somewhat diluted by the "number of searches squared" numerator.

[brian.mark]

I've ignored KEI and other factors for a while now. If I want a term, I'll go for a term. Ranking isn't rocket science, so I give lower volume terms a little less effort, but watch how simple stuff affects the high volume terms. If using it on page a few times boosts me to #37, I'll work on it more. If I get some links and optimize on-page and still rank #10,000 then I'm going to drop it.

# of competing pages doesn't mean much. 64M+ for "tool parts", but ranking #1 there isn't too difficult since most people get that term "incidentally" instead of "intentionally". If it were 64M intentionals, that'd be a different story.

Brian.