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What is Keyword Difficulty and How to Use it for Good SEO [Video Tutorial]
Getting your website to rank high for a certain keyword always takes time. Building backlinks, optimizing content, and so on. But what if some of your target keywords are a waste of time and money because the top 10 competitors are too strong for you to ever beat them.
In this video, we explain what keyword difficulty is and how to use our free keyword difficulty checker so that you can choose keywords that are not too hard to get high rankings for.
Hi, it’s Mary from SEO PowerSuite, the all-in-one toolkit that covers every aspect of SEO. Before we begin make sure to subscribe to our channel and click the bell icon so that you won’t miss any upcoming tutorials.
Keyword Difficulty is an SEO metric showing how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 results for any given keyword in Google or any other search engine. If you don't take this metric into account, you risk wasting time while optimizing your pages for the wrong keywords, which is the worst nightmare for any SEO.
In simple terms, keyword difficulty will help you to:
Quickly analyze large lists of keywords
Pick the most effective ones And save time and effort
Alright, but where can you find this metric? We’ve made a simple yet powerful keyword difficulty checker tool in Rank Tracker. And it’s free. This is how you can use it.
Rank Tracker allows doing thorough keyword research with multiple in-built tools, like Google autocomplete, related searches, YouTube suggestions, and two dozen more. After you’ve finished doing keyword research, you will have hundreds or even thousands of suggestions in the Keyword Sandbox.
Here, you can select any or all keywords, hit Update Keyword Data, and select the Keyword Difficulty metric. Click OK, and the keyword checker will immediately run the analysis and calculate keyword difficulty scores.
Your best bet is keywords marked with green color, which means that their difficulty is low, and your website can easily get into the top 10 with properly optimized content.
Keywords marked with orange color are more difficult and will probably require not only great content but also backlinks.
To make your estimations more precise, you can use Keyword Difficulty in combination with other SEO metrics, such as:
Search Volume - how many times people search for the keyword on Google per month
Competition - showing the strength of the competitors for the keyword
Keyword Effectiveness Index, which takes into account all the mentioned metrics and predicts how effective the keyword might be.
Remember there is no one definite keyword difficulty score that is good – it is all relative and depends on the strength of your domain and the competition for a keyword. For example, for our domain, we try to select keywords with a keyword difficulty below 40, taking into account search volumes as well.
And one more thing to bear in mind is competition. Even keywords with low keyword difficulty may have average competition, which means we will need more effort to start ranking for the keyword.
Here, we need to get a closer look at our organic competitors. How can we do that? Rank Tracker has a quick SERP Analysis tool for that.
Hover over the target keyword and hit the Analyze SERP button. The tool will switch to the SERP Analysis module and will check SEO stats for the top 50 competitors. The keyword checker will provide the list of competing pages and their main metrics such as
Traffic ranking keywords InLink Rank shows how strong their backlink profile is, and even page performance and Core Web Vitals assessment.
What you need to evaluate is how your domain compares to competitors according to the metrics provided. Do they have more backlinks? Do they rank well for a big bunch of keywords?
Finally, pay attention to what kinds of pages are ranking for the query.
Moreover, the checker calculates the correlation for the main ranking factors as low, moderate, or high. For those with high correlation, it means that all the ranking pages have been optimized properly for this factor, and probably you must do it as well.
For your convenience, Keyword Difficulty is available in all modules of Rank Tracker – in Keyword research for earlier analysis, in Tracked Keywords for tracking progress, in Keyword Map for SEO analysis and planning.
You can try and see how our keyword checker works right now as with Rank Tracker you can access limitless keyword data absolutely free of charge. Download the software, create a project for your website, and get accurate SEO analysis with a couple of clicks.
That’s it for today. If you found this video helpful, make sure to subscribe to our channel and stay tuned for more valuable tips and tricks to optimize your website's performance.
Until next time, take care, and happy optimizing! Bye!
