Keyword Difficulty

Experienced SEO professionals typically gauge the ranking difficulty of each keyword manually. That is, by looking at the search results for each keyword and analyzing them. They account for many different factors to judge how hard or easy it’ll be to rank:

• Search intent
• Content depth, relevance, freshness, authority
• Number (and quality) of backlinks
• Domain Rating
• SERP features
• Etc

This process varies from person to person, and there’s no consensus on precisely what is and isn’t important here. 

One person might believe that Domain Rating is important, and another might think that relevance plays more of a role. 

The opinions might also vary depending on the type of search query that they’re analyzing, because for different kinds of queries Google gives preference to different things.

All of that makes life a little difficult for SEO tool creators, who try to distill the complex and intricate concept of ranking difficulty down to a simple two-digit number. 

But after talking to many professional SEOs about the signals that an actionable Keyword Difficulty (KD) score should factor in, we realized that everyone agreed on at least one thing: Backlinks are very important for ranking. 

So, in the end, we decided to base our Keyword Difficulty (KD) score on the number of unique websites linking to the top 10 ranking pages.

As you can see in the image above, KD relates to the estimated number of linking websites your page needs to rank in the top 10. 

Did you get that? It’s not the estimated number of linking websites you need to rank #1. It’s the estimated number you need to rank in the top 10. Getting to #1 is an entirely different battle.

Many people misuse the KD metric by setting the filter from 0 to 10 and focusing solely on the easy keyword ideas. But here’s why avoiding high-KD keywords might be a mistake:

1. You should go after high-KD keywords sooner, not later – You’ll need lots of backlinks to rank for high-KD keywords, which takes a lot of time and resources. So it pays to create your page and begin promoting it as soon as possible. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get there.
2. Look at high-KD keywords as link opportunities – The fact that the top-ranking pages for some keywords have lots of backlinks is a sign of a “link-worthy” topic. If you create something original on that topic, there’s a good chance lots of people will link to you.

The bottom line is this: KD is not there to deter you from targeting specific keywords. It’s there to help you understand what it’ll take to rank for a given query (as well as the “link-worthiness” of a given topic).

Just know that you should always manually assess keywords before going after them and not rely solely on any tool’s difficulty score to make your final decision. No single score can distill the complexity of Google’s ranking algorithm into a single number. Be wary of tool creators who suggest otherwise.