How to interpret the keyword tool?
-
I've played with the keyword tool a bit. Some keywords have 43% difficulty and some have 55%.
What do these difficulty levels mean? I don't really know how to go about it.
-
Well the term I'm trying to rank for is "Lack of sleep."
My website: http://www.lackofsleephq.com
I've built a lot of no follow links via blog comments mostly. I'm trying to develop more web 2.0 strategies and find ways to get more dofollow links as well.
But currently, my website is in position 200 or so per google webmaster tools.
-
Do you mean, can you rank for it or, can you rank for it in a week or two? Yes, you can rank for it. It will require great on page SEO, quality content, more quality content, and diligence. Is it a term that can be assisted locally? etc.
Next, the other opinion I would give is don't start out worrying about #1. With our clients, we follow the rankings through campaign reports, etc. If we have a term we like and it is progressively moving up, we feel we are having an effect. If I was to be worried that a given search term was not at #1 in a fixed time period, I might go nuts....or more nuts. There are times we will have a term move up ten or twelve spots in a week and others that move slower. It really depends on the competition and the effort (quality and quantity) that is put into it.
-
Well, for instance, a keyword I'm trying to rank #1 for has "56%" difficulty.
It gets 12,000 exact searches a month. Is it worth the effort? Can I actually rank for it?
=\
-
Check out this thread on the keyword difficulty tool.
In short, the percentages are meaningless unless you have experience with ranking terms at different levels. Even then it's just a starting point, and you'll be best served by analyzing the underlying data. For example, I generally have an easy time with keywords at the 50% difficulty and know that first page is reasonable within 90 days - but that's personal experience and your mileage will vary.
-
Brian, the easiest way to explain it is that the higher the %, the more difficult it will be to rank for a given keyword. So if you want to watch it change, take a keyword that is highly searched (bankruptcy attorney) and put it in; the difficulty comes back at say a 63%. Then look at how the top ranking urls fair in Domain Auth and Page Auth and you will see about where you need to be to get ranked on that term. But, if you make it longer Bankruptcy attorney Chapter 11, you will see % drop and PA, DA of ranked pages go down which means it is easier to rank for that term.
But...the best use of this tool is to then go part way down page to where it says run full report and click that and put in your url to see where you would rank and to compare the various metrics used in ranking. If you wish to get more info go to this blog by Rand.
Hope you try it out.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Minor languages keyword research
Hello, I am in charge of doing a keyword research for several small countries in Europe, namely Hungary, Estonia and Latvia.
Keyword Research | | Lvet
I normally use the Keyword planner for Google Ads, but for Hungarian, Estonian and Latvian this tools seems to find no results for the keywords related to my websites. For example, in Hungarian the keyword "ajak toltoanyagok" ("lip fillers" in English) doesn't give any results (and yes, I am targeting my searches to Hungary and Hungarian). I have the same problems with Latvian and Estonian. Is there another tool that I could use and that could give me better results? Help! Cheers Luca rONwtZt0 -
Optimizing a Webpage without keywords
Hi all, I’m really running into a challenge internally lately in that we have a lot of teams redesigning or building new pages (specificially one team) that do NOT loop our teams in. When we finally get them to work with us, to drive traffic to the pages, they disagree that there must be other ways of optimizing the pages than focusing on keywords with search volume that are relevant to the page. We usually land that they will choose a keyword or two they think a user will search for, we do keyword research and pick something close (because they don’t want to utilize a term that doesn’t make much sense, as they have written the content without involving us from the beginning, but then our search volume is declining). They keep saying there are other ways than changing the paired down content on their page and adding in keywords to the H1 headers, content on page. they mentioned semantic search at one point. For example, https://www.entrust.com/products/entrust-getaccess/ currently ranks around #10 for "single sign on solution." This keyword was on the previous page quite a few times in headers and body copy. Now it appears on the page 3 times after the redesign and is not in the h1. The team does for example want to optimize for this term, but there’s lots of pushback as they want a page with minimal content and little design. Just wondering your thoughts on this. IS this a common challenge you deal with too and any idea on answers as I've tried many with the teams? Thanks, Laura
Keyword Research | | lauramrobinson321 -
How to Choose the Best Keywords for a Website
I am working with an insurance agency that wants to target the below types of insurance in Dalton GA, Ringold GA, Chattanooga TN and and/or Georgia. Home Insurance
Keyword Research | | lagunaitech
Auto Insurance
Health Insurance
Life Insurance
Restaurant Insurance
Contractor Insurance They are a new agency that doesn't have a website yet and only a small online marketing budget. Right now, I'm starting to work with them on their new site and want to make sure the on-site SEO works with the insurance/locations they want to target. What I'm having trouble with is the volume of monthly searches and trying to find keywords that they could realistically get some traffic and leads from. Most of the keywords I check with the Adwords tool are less than 50 exact match searches or just show a dash. The only keywords with a decent amount of exact searches are the main insurance types like "restaurant insurance" or "home insurance Georgia". How can I get an idea of the number of leads and amount of traffic this site might get when most of the keywords searched for only a handful of times per month? I can build the site to easily target all the above types of insurance in Dalton, GA, which has a population of about 33,000, but I don't know what kind of results this agency might expect if they were to rank in the top 3 spots. Thanks in advance for any ideas or advice!0 -
What keywords does the competition have?
I know this might be a long shot. I've been working on my google rankings and am first for a few keywords but still seeing quite low traffic. Is there a tool that allows me to see what keywords my competition is receiving high levels of traffic from? Thanks Dan
Keyword Research | | DanFromUK0 -
Where to start with keyword research for a telecom company?
Hey, I'm a brand's person with no SEO experience, yet I'm in a position where I have to carry out an SEO audit of our telecom company's website. Though our website is up and running for some years now, nobody bothered to undertake keyword research. From the little I've read over months on SEOmoz, I've just done the following: took out keywords bringing organic traffic on to our website and checked our rankings for those keywords on major search engines. My observation is that most of these words are long-tail keywords. Since we only have product/service information related to our offerings, most of the head terms we've used for packages/offers/services pages are branded keywords. My understanding is that we need to rank top for our branded keywords (a must) and try to rank as high as possible for long tail. In addition, we can use those keywords in our copy so that the right page ranks top for the respective keyword. Am I missing anything here? What else do I need to do?
Keyword Research | | HasanPK0 -
How are similar keyword phrases related?
I'm new to SEO and have been reading a lot to try to get up to speed. There is one concept that I'm not clear about and am not sure what to search on to find an answer. Let's say I'm trying to target 2 keyword phrases "Wordpress SEO" and "Wordpress SEO plugin". In the content of my web page should I always write "Wordpress SEO plugin" because it'll count towards both phrases I'm trying to target? Or would Google be smart enough to only give me credit for "Wordpress SEO plugin" in that case and I should also put just "Wordpress SEO" in other places in my content? Hopefully that makes sense. Thanks in advance!
Keyword Research | | Yuba302 -
How reliable is GWT's keyword data & what is the most accurate way of determining keywords you currently rank for?
I have been monitoring the query data (keywords, average position, CTR, etc.) in GWT, but sometimes the ranking data seems off. I filter the dates for the past week, so it is the most recent. I manually check some of the rankings and they are way off. Does anyone have feedback on this? If you have access to multiple domain data, that would be great. What is the most accurate way of determining keywords you currently rank for? I have also used keywordspy, and that is off too!
Keyword Research | | inhouseseo0 -
Keyword Search
Keyword search How low is too low for choosing to use a key phrase for one of your articles, website pages, etc. I see some with 100 local and global searches. Is this too low to really be spending the time working on this key phrase?
Keyword Research | | sansonj1