Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Keyword difficulty and time to rank
-
Hello,
Is there a correlation between the keyword difficult and the time it takes to rank ?
In other words let's say I try to rank for the keyword "seo" and it is going to take 2 years to rank 1 st whereas if I go for "best seo tools in 2018" and it takes just 2 weeks ?
Thank you,
-
There is no any Specific but you can use my personal formula!
If Allintitle: = Less then 50 then can rank in 1 month
Allinurl: = Less then 50 then can rank in 1 month
If greater then it then you can increase days according to this!
Thanks
Regard: James John
Website: Bows Guide
-
Yes, there is a direct correlation between the keyword difficulty and the time it takes to rank for it. There is also a concept/formula that can predict how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword. It is called Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) and is developed by Doug Cunnington. KGR is calculated by dividing the number of allintitle Google results for a specific keyword by its search volume. If the KGR for a keyword is less than 0.25, it's a low-competitive keyword that you can rank for easily and quickly. Please note that 0.25 is just a rule of thumb and you can select any threshold you think is right for you.
There is also a nifty tool built for this, called Allintitle Bulk Search tool that calculates the KGR score for many keywords at once: https://allintitle.co
Hope this helps. -
Thank you,
-
Hi there,
Sure thing - skip down to page 8 here https://email.semrush.com/acton/attachment/13557/f-0e30/1/-/-/-/-/SEMrush_Ranking_Factors_Study_2_0.pdf
thanks
-
Hi Espres SEO,
Thank you for the your reply.
Can you send me a link that say that traffic is an important ranking factor, I never heard about that.
Thank you,
-
Hi seoanalytics,
In that situation I would try and share the content on social media and in slack communities as much as possible to get the word out. By doing so you increase direct traffic (an important ranking factor) and increase the chances of someone linking to the content externally.
thanks
-
My question:
When you have written good content and have a good internal linking structure, what else can you do to rank on high competition keywords (those that have a difficulty of around 50 for example). Just be patient and wait or is there anything else that can be done ?
Thank you,
-
It means in some way that big companies with strong PA and DA have an advantage on high volume keyword ?
Length of content does it mean that you need long content to compete ? or can you compete with better content even though it isn't long ?
Thank you,
-
EGOL is correct above, keep in mind there are a ton of other factors and your competition online (those ranking highly currently) are more than likely not standing still in an SEO sense (so it is a moving target usually).
The lower the competition, the "easier" and supposed "less time" it will take to rank on page 1 of Google is a good rule of thumb. It is also incredibly important to do competitive research on those in the top 3 positions on page 1 to see how long their content is, the quality of it, and the number of quality links it has pointing to it.
-
Coud it be that content of the same quality takes less time to rank when there is a less competition ?
I understand about all the other variable but see that you aren't suppose to ask for links but you content is suppose to attract links it means that once you publish your content you need to wait and for some keyword you might need to wait less and for some more for your content to start being visible.
Does strength of a domain really matter because I have seen webpages with almost no PA and DA outrank page with strong PA and DA.
It is on long tail queries but still, it seems that content matter a lot those days. Link helps but only make a difference if you are trying to rank on SEO for longer queries it seems to matter less.
Thank you,
-
Hi,
It all depends on competition. In order to rank competitive keywords huge effort and time required specially in case of single word keyword.
If you search 'SEO' in Google ,42,90,00,000 results showing while searching 'best seo tools in 2018', 39,70,000 results showing.You can see difference is huge that is why 'best seo tools' easy to rank and get less time and efforts.
In short competition is directly proportional to time & effort*
Thanks
-
The amount of time that it takes to rank has a lot of variables... the variables that you have some control over area....
A) the quality of your content
B) the strength of your website
C) your ability to get links into the new page
The actions of your visitors are also important. They can share, they can engage, or they can do one of these or neither.
The actions of your competitors are also important. They can be working on content for similar keywords, they can be working on links to their competing page, or working on links to their entire website.
All of this is why SEOs can't guarantee rankings or "time to rank". But mainly, they don't have control over their competitors.
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
-
Keyword Ranking Fluctuations
Hi Guys I am currently working on a website where one of the keyword targets is fluctuating. The keyword is fluctuating between page 2 and page 5. What makes this strange is that we are not experiencing the issue with any other keyword targets. They are all ranking fine. It is only 1 keyword. The keyword target happens to be the main homepage keyword target - not sure if this makes a difference? The homepage targets 2 keyword e.g. Business Offices & Accessories. The homepage ranks perfectly fine for e.g. Business Accessories but is fluctuating for e.g. Business Offices! Very strange. What makes it even stranger - the keyword variations of the fluctuating keyword e.g. office for business - these variations are all fine and not fluctuating. Its only 1 keyword. If anyone has any ideas or feedback that would be great! Thanks, Duncan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
How to rank if you are an aggregator or a directory of resource?
Most of the SEO suggestions (great quality content, long form content, engagement rate/time on the page, authority inbound links ) apply to content oriented site. But what should you do if you are an aggregator or a resource directory? You aim is to send the user faster to other site they are looking for or provide ranking about the resources. In fact at a very basic level you are competing for search engine traffic because they are doing same things. You may have done a hand crafted, human created resource that is better than what algorithms are showing. And your site likely to have lot more outgoing links than content. You know you are better (or getting better) since repeat visitors keep coming back. So in these days of Search engines, what a resource directory or aggregator site do to rank? Because even directories need first time visitors till they start coming back again.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maayboli0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago. For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is. Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain? Thank you for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1231 -
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content. They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it. Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter. Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader. Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates? Thoughts appreciated. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Exact keyword URL or not?
Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
How to Target Keyword Permutations
I have a client that wants to rank for a keyword phrase that has many permutations.. ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort", "Hill Country Resort Alaska", "Hill Country Alaska Resort" But I'm wondering if I should target these all on the same page or not. I'm assuming all of these permutations are actually valid searches because I did my keyword research for 'exact match' keywords and got results like this.. (let me know if I'm missing something here, or if this sounds right) [Alaska Hill Country Resort] - 230 Local Searches [Hill Country Resort Alaska] - 140 Local Searches [Hill Country Alaska Resort] - 30 Local Searches The phrase we're targeting is their main keyword phrase, so I've chosen their home-page as the page to rank for this phrase. My thought is to optimize for the most popular phrase (ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort"), and sprinkle in the other phrases throughout the copy. Next I would run a link-building campaign targeting the main phrase first.. then the next phrase, and so on, so that my anchor text is more heavily focused on the more popular terms, but I would also make sure to include the less popular terms. Do you think this is the best way to go about this? Do I really need to make individual pages for each of the permutations, or is it okay to target them all on one page since they are essentially the same keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Sudden rank drop for 1 keyword
A page of mine (http://loginhelper.com/networks/facebook-login/) was ranking in the top 10 for keyword (facebook login) and has been for at least 2 months, moving between 5th and 10th. Suddenly in the last 3 days the rank for the keyword dropped from 7th to 46th, yet none of the other keywords have been affected (they target other pages) and their ranks have continued to improve. I am trying to figure out what caused this sudden drop in the ranking of 1 page (the page has quality mainly text based content and isn't in the least bit shallow or spammy) I have been thinking perhaps a crawl or server error may be to cause leaving the page temporarily unavailable or with a big load time... Otherwise what could cause one page to drop so much so quickly whilst other pages improved their rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netboost0