Within these two school's of thought a keyword's value is based on either:

1. The monthly search volume relative to the level of competition, or
2. The revenue acquisition potential (or conversion rate)

There are a number of ways to get relative monthly search volume, but what remains the easiest is using Google keyword planner (the replacement for the now deprecated keyword tool).

It's not quite as straight-forward as the keyword tool was, as there is a much heavier focus on AdWords data, but it still provides a starting point for your research.

Since the default focus is on building keyword lists for AdWords, you will need to toggle from the default Ad Groups to Keywords:

• After entering your seed keyword(s), you will need to switch the default from 'ad group ideas' to 'keyword ideas'
• Then after you've built your initial list - you need to click 'Review Estimates,' at which point you will need to toggle (again) from 'Ad Group' to 'Keyword,' and then enter a bid before you see any useful data.

You need to take into consideration the authority of the websites that are already ranking for these keywords, and get a sense of the competitiveness of that particular organic SERP.

There are a few key signals I look at when doing a 30 second synopsis of a SERP, and my favorite tool to get an on the fly sense of relative competition is the Mozbar extension for chrome, which gives you some at-a-glance SEO data at the URL level conveniently right in the SERP interface.

For a more comprehensive macro analysis of an organic SERP, I'm really liking SerpIQ, shown below:

Moz has a version of this called their keyword rank report, as pictured below for the keyword parking blocks:

But this doesn't take a look at the SERP as a whole … it doesn't provide me with quick insight into what it is going to take to compete with these 10 URL's and get on page 1, at least not without some more in-depth analysis.

To get a good sense of the competition at the aggregate organic SERP level, I prefer to use SerpIQ.

SerpIQ offers a snapshot of the average Competitiveness Index (CI):

An estimate of the search intent of the query:

A quick overview of the SERP including the breakdown of the competitiveness and both the on-page and off-page use metrics for the keyword:

The highest, lowest, and average CI of the SERP:

The highest, lowest, and average PageRank of the SERP:

The highest, lowest, and average number of backlinks:

And finally the oldest, youngest, and average domain age of each result:

So as you can see, this offers an at-a-glance snapshot of the both the upper and lower limit's in terms of overall SERP competition.

The keyword opportunity model that we're going to be building later on is based on the idea of taking a macro approach to dissecting SERP's at the keyword level, which in my opinion, is necessary for enterprise SEO and growing websites to over 100,000 visitors per month .

The macro approach to keyword research is necessary for content heavy websites ( and optimizing for traffic), but not ideal when doing intent-focused keyword research, as would be the case for Ecommerce, software, or other scenarios where some keyword phrases are going to carry significantly more qualification.