londonblue Hello, Heather here I hope you are well. Thank you for your feedback.
This area of NicheIQ topics works differently from the topic suggestions. With topic suggestions they are designed to grow with your site so that there is a reasonable possibility that once you have written an article connected to that keyword in time the article will rank and you will start to get traffic to that page.
As your site grows and gets more established the NicheIQ topic suggestions will increase the difficulty and complexity of being able to rank for the keywords so that you are always getting NicheIQ topic suggestions that are right for where your site is in it's growth.
For the Competitors List this is based on the volume of keywords that overlap between your site and there site. The list is designed to help you understand the competitive space that you are in and who else could be part of the SERP result for all the keywords that you currently have on your site.
Within the Competitor list you can use the filters on the keyword overlap, rank delta and overlap ratio to help you to understand your Competitors better and how they compare to your site.
For example, Reddit is shown as part of your competitors list quite high up because of the volume of keyword overlap. If you change the filters so that it shows which sites rank better or worse than yours as a domain for the keywords. We can see that Reddit ranks lower down the rankings than your site does.