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What is the ideal keyword difficulty percentage?
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I am trying to establish my best keywords using the keyword difficulty tool. So if I want to come up with the best keywords, should I use the ones that come in at 50%??
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I am wondering why Moz doesn't include a calculation for this IN the tool? Something like the old school KEI (keyword effectiveness index). Would be nice if the tool would save a step by calculating this number and giving a score based on difficulty as a factor of search volume.
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Yes. We load all of this data:
- keyword difficulty score
- traffic estimates
- cpc
in a spreadsheet, calculate a weighted score with min/max-caps and sort all keyphrases by this score. And voila ... we have a todo

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Thank you so much Ben - this help a lot!
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The keyword difficulty tool gives an indication of how hard it will be to rank for a certain term. So the lower the difficulty the easier it is to rank for.
A good rule of thumb is that you want to rank for terms with a low difficulty that drives a lot of users who are likely to achieve your goal. So for me he perfect term would -
- Have a low difficulty score
- Have a high volume of searchers
- Have a higher than average conversion rate when those searchers hit my site.
Hope that helps.
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