How do you "really" determine KW competitiveness?

[Captain Midnight]

I have a potential client that is running a regional Insurance agency. I know from working with other very competitive industries that they are just that.. competitive. (such as mortgage brokers, banks, hosting companies, etc.)

But, how do you actually identify that the potential client needs more "heat" to get them ranked higher? In other words, the keyword "health insurance" is listed at Adwords as being "Medium" competition (although you would pay $73,000 per DAY for this). Whereas something like "health insurance texas" is identified as being "High" competition and about 4x PPC value (but with lower search volume of course)

In general, I have a standard configuration for standard clients that works well, but when I have client that is theoretically in a competitive market, I need to bump up the link-building .. but by how much and how do I determine this? I need to justify this to the client.

Thanks,
CM

[petroleum]

when i do competition research for keywords i look at the usual things in the top results like domain age, number of indexed pages, pagerank, number of competing pages for the keyword--put the keyword in quotes "health insurance" then see how many pages google has indexed it is usually far less than the number they display for results. After that from experience i estimate how much it would cost me to rank it. And if the price that makes sense for me and the owner i.e we both can make money I'll make the offer. Obviously, i can misquote and it can cost me money because it is difficult to ask for more money after you have already agreed on something but in the long term a happy customer is worth it especially if you try to get referrals from them.

[dominodivine]

You should definitely invest into marketsamurai, this tool will help give you some real insight on keyword competitiveness.

And the training is also good.

[petroleum]

ya market samurai is awesome