Keyword Difficulty Score Assesment
-
What is a good keyword difficulty score to pursue when deciding which keywords to try and rank on?
I'm in a very competitive field and I am currently in the process of doing keyword research to look for the low hanging fruit.
-
Hi,
Moz says that keyword difficulty score is based in domain authority and page authority of the competing 20 search results for a keyword. I wonder if it only takes those 2 values because, in that case, that score would not be representative enough for the difficulty. Does not it take the onpage optimization -keyword in title, text, etc-?
How do you determine the keyword difficulty?
Your Keyword Difficulty Score is based on the Domain Authority and Page authority for the top 20 search results that keyword is pulling on Google. These sites are analyzed using our Mozscape index to pull Page Authority and Domain Authority. These two metrics (along with a host of others from the Mozscape index) help create the Keyword Difficulty score.
-
I'd reverse engineer a little and see what keyword difficulties you've managed to rank on so far and why. Of course, the numeric score is just a guideline and take it with a grain of salt. Start with with what you've managed to rank on so far and then look for similar or somewhat more difficult terms going forward.
-
Old question now, but interesting none the less and currently marked as unanswered. As tomcraig86 says there is much more to it than relying on the KD score, but I tend to go by the rough guide of :
- Sub 30 - pretty easy.
- 30 - 35 fairly easy with good on page and some quality anchored links.
- 35 - 40 - starting to take a bit more effort, air tight on-site SEO required as well as good link profile.
- 40 - 50 domain authority counts much more, without it will take longer to rank although I have done this with minimal off-site efforts before.
- 50+ All about resources. Onsite SEO needs to be totally nailed, including internal linking/ topic modelling etc. a strong & diverse link profile with good social signals and ... time.
This is just from my experience of ranking for keywords in conjunction with output from this awesome tool. Been doing SEO for some time, but only using the keyword difficulty tool for about 12 months.
-
You'll need to assess which keywords are actually a possibility for your site. Ranking isn't down to just the keyword you're going for. Domain age, authority, trust etc are all factors used in calculating your position in the SERPs. Don't get scared off by a 'Highly Competitive' keyword though!!
-
Well if you want a keyword you have to just go for it! If your site has loads of unique content, the likelyhood is that you'll start seeing benefits from long tail searches coming in with not too much work.
Check out the PRO campaigns on here, I'm assuming you're aware that SEOmoz utilizes some Google API's to serve up their own keyword difficulty score. Unfortunately the site I'm link building to is in a super competitive market!
Hope this helps.
Tom
-
That is the tool I am asking about, whats a good percentage score to go after when researching a keyword?
-
SEOMoz Have its own Keyword Difficulty tool and it have a very good and powerful analysis for the top 10 rankings.
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 Planner not showing exact match
hi guys I'm currently trying to optimize a site for 'Recruitment Agency North West' when I enter his term into keyword planner it gives me no results for the exact match, but offers me figures for 'Recruitment Agencies North West' Am I to assume that nobody has ever searched 'Recruitment Agency North West'?!!! and that I should be focusing on 'Recruitment Agencies North West' as my main key phrase? Is there another site other than keyword planner that will give me results for 'Recruitment Agency North West'? cheers M
Keyword Research | | Staunton_Rook0 -
Which keyword for title
I'm trying to figure out what to use for my title text. It's for a structural steel fabrication company. Adwords has the average monthly searches for "structural steel" and "steel fabrication" identical at 5,400. It has "structural steel fabrication" at 390 which I get that since its longer and a little more specific will have less searches. My question is if I make the title "structural steel fabrication" does google just see it as 1 big keyword or will it rank for "structural steel" and/or "steel fabrication"? What would any of you go with here? All 3 keyword strings make sense for the person seeing the title. Thanks for any advice you can give, Clay
Keyword Research | | clayknight0 -
Keywords with and without diacritics
Hi, I am trying to make my site to appear in the search results even the searched term have or have not been wrote with diacritics for example: "șarpe" or "sarpe". The language is Romanian. If I seach for "Românul cu maşină, marea victimă" or "Romanul cu masina, marea victima" the first result for both searches is the same. I don't see anything special on their html code and I am wondering how do they did it. Regards, Bogdan
Keyword Research | | RIAdig0 -
Internal URLs competing for keyword
I have an affiliate site where we have reviews of bookmakers, which are optimized for the bookmakers name as a key word. We have seen a drop in rankings and at this point we are out ranked by a lot of pages including our own. We also have a community forum and write news and articles about the the bookmakers. The thing is, that these forum threads and articles often out rank our review pages, which are the pages we need people to land on in order to convert. This page: http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/bet365 is optimized for "bet365" and is at this point outranked by http://www.betxpert.com/artikel/ny-funktion-hos-bet365-afslut-vaeddemaal-foer-tid. This page actually links to the review. What should i do in order to increase ranks for my pages? Make the forum threads and articles crappy for the key word? Would it help to add a canonical link to the articles? Would it help to remove the meta tag for update time of the review, such that Google does not downrank for not being recent? -Rasmus
Keyword Research | | rasmusbang0 -
Top keywords
Hi, Where can I get a reliable list of the top 1000 keywords searched for over the last few months or 2012 or whatever? Thanks
Keyword Research | | jwdl0 -
Keyword stuffing
Just wondered whether you think the footer text here on tis page constitues 'keyword stuffing'. I think it does but wondering why they haven't been penalised for it. http://www . lippyliciouscakes . co.uk/ Thoughts? Many thanks.
Keyword Research | | littlesthobo1 -
Keyword analysis ways to improve it
I am aways being my worst critique and constantly looking to improve. Thats how you become a winner right ! something I feel I can improve on is Keyword analysis and targeting. I would really appreciate hearing stories of other SEO's on here , gaining an insight into the techniques you use and how your keyword analysis has evolved as time has gone by. Thanks in advance.
Keyword Research | | onlinemediadirect1 -
Newbie has various questions about keywords
Hi All - Im just learning, would appreciate some clarification on how keywords work. Specifically: For a phrase keyword, does order matter? E.g. is 'Bridging loans UK' the same keyword as 'UK bridging loans'? Again in a phrase, do the keywords need to be adjacent? So if I had a an H1 tag on my page which was 'We provide Briding loans for the entire UK', would this be considered a match for the keyword phrase 'Bridging loans uk' ? As I understand it, optimising your site for a certain keyword involves 2 things at a basic level:a) Including that keyword on your site, and b) Getting relevant inbound links from other sites with that keyword as the anchor text. Is this correct? Are there other large scale factors? What is the balance between those 2 (or more) main factors? Which is most important?
Keyword Research | | nebbisch0