Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Perfect - totally understand your response and this helps me alot; I wrote this question thinking highly competitive meant (typically) 10 years. Thanks again.

Thanks for the answer Robert, this expands my thinking - I like the blue ocean/red ocean idea, and I understand the verticals concept (although I'm a newb when it comes to SEO).

So based on your thinking, would you say ballpark estimates for reaching top-3 in local searches (with consistent and expert SEO) would be:

• around 3 months for highly competitive keywords,

• 1 month for a 'competitiveness' score of around 35?

... and multiply this by, say, 4 for global-dominant rankings...

For me so much in business planning comes down to gauging demand before developing products, and in this case I'm using keyword research to gauge market demand / competitiveness tradeoffs before I start...

SEOMoz's keyword research tool is awesome, but what does the competitiveness actually mean in terms of time/effort?

I've read the help file which is great but to get an idea, to rank for highly competitive keywords, is that 12 months of constant effort, link-building and keyword buying or more like 3 months? (how massive is massive?)

I know its a hard question to answer, but an idea would be awesome. Thanks to anyone that can answer in advance...