Keyword competition shows how many advertisers compete to show paid ads for a keyword on Google. It is an advertising metric. It does not tell you how hard it is to rank in Google’s regular results - that is keyword difficulty, and whether your own site can win is Weak spots.
Not the same as keyword difficulty
The two are confused all the time because both sound like “how competitive is this keyword?”. They answer different questions:
| Keyword competition | Keyword difficulty | |
| What it measures | How many advertisers bid to show paid ads for the keyword | How hard it is to rank in Google’s regular results |
| Which results | Paid ads | Regular (organic) results |
| Use it to | Judge how commercially valuable the keyword is | Judge how tough the ranking competition is |
A keyword can have high competition and low difficulty, or the other way round, so read each for its own question.
Where you’ll see it
On the Keywords screen and in a page’s details, the Competition column shows one of three values for each keyword: Low, Medium, or High.
How to read it
High competition means advertisers are paying for this search. That usually signals commercial value: people who search it tend to buy. It often goes with a higher cost per click.
Low competition means few advertisers bid. The search may be less commercial, or simply overlooked by advertisers. It says nothing about how easy it is to rank.
Use it as a value signal, not a difficulty signal. When two keywords look equally winnable, the one with more advertising competition is often closer to a sale. Check it against the search intent.
How we get it
RankDots takes keyword competition from Google Keyword Planner, the same source as search volume, for your project’s country. Google describes it as how competitive ad placement is for a keyword.
For a page or a topic cluster, competition is the average across all of its keywords. It is fixed when your project is created and is not refreshed afterwards.
It describes the ad auction, so it is an estimate from Google’s advertising tools, not a measurement of your own results.
What it doesn’t tell you
- Whether you can rank. Use keyword difficulty and Weak spots.
- Who ranks in the regular results. The Google Top 20 column shows that.
- How the ad market has changed since you created the project. The value shows the state at creation.
- What a click actually costs. That is CPC [link is coming].
- Whether ads appeared on the page. The Ads Top and Ads Bottom icons in SERP features show that.
What next
- What is keyword difficulty?
- What is CPC? [link is coming]