How to tell if a keyword is too competitive for you
A tool gave the keyword a difficulty score and you have no idea whether that score applies to a site like yours.
Difficulty scores model the average site, which is not yours
Every difficulty metric is a function of the link profiles currently ranking. It says nothing about whether those pages are any good, and nothing about whether your page could be obviously better.
Read the weakest result on page one
Ignore the top three. Look at positions eight, nine and ten. If one of them is a thin listicle, an abandoned forum thread, or a page that does not actually do the job the query asks for, the query is takeable. That is the whole assessment.
Length is not competitiveness
Two-word phrases are not automatically head terms and long phrases are not automatically easy. Judge by what occupies the results, not by word count.
Read the results page, not the difficulty score
Open the query and look at what is actually ranking. Count how many results genuinely answer it, how many are there on authority alone, and whether any of them are older than three years and unmaintained. A difficulty score of 40 means nothing next to the observation that four of the ten results are thin pages from big domains, which is the most beatable configuration in search.
Competitive is relative to your authority, and yours is measurable
This site reached 42,320 clicks at a domain rating of 22, with 122 linking sites. That is not a strong profile. It defines the shelf you can reach: terms where the ranking pages are in the same range, or where they are strong domains phoning it in. Know your own number and the question stops being subjective.
Measured, not asserted
This site holds an average position of 9.07 across 160 pages with a Domain Rating of 22. It reached 100,542 users by winning queries whose page one was weak, not by outranking well-resourced competitors.
Free tool for this: SERP Audit. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.