Keyword Difficulty
-
is probably a "how long is a piece of string" question but wondered how to use the keyword difficulty tool, particularly in relation to the % and the wording moderate, what are these actually saying?
Perhaps some of you could give details of how you use this tool and apply the % and term to real world situations,
Thanks in advance, Lee
-
Thank you Sha
"I'm sure you know already that you dodged a bullet by losing that client Lee :)"
Agreed, I had a bad feeling about them at the initial meeting, the second meeting merely convinced me they were a bad lot. Thought they were very controlling, inflexible and negative towards new concepts or embracing social.
So yeah in hindsight I'm glad I lost the contract, but I did learn from the experience which is a plus :))
-
"There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see!"
I'm sure you know already that you dodged a bullet by losing that client Lee
What you currently see in the keyword difficulty tool is just a representation of how competitive the term is. The tool previously also showed local and global broad and exact match search volume for your term, but Google's recent decision to withdraw developer access for the Adwords API means they are no longer visible.
As mentioned by others here, the report generated below the competition result, which shows results on specific metrics for the Top 10 Domains ranking for the term (and the advanced Report you can generate if you want to) is by far the most valuable output from this tool.
There is a detailed blog post from Rand Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset, which explains in detail how to use the information to see what you can improve to have a shot at matching it with those sites.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I know what you mean.... Getting even poor content out of some business owners is impossible.
-
"content on a retail site it gains an enormous advantage over competitors (who do not have that type of asset) in its ability to climb the SERPs."
Perhaps I should hire you to convince my clients! Just lost a potential contract for suggesting this (insurance company). All of their content was very poor, one news post had 27 words and included 3 keyword strings - Couldn't believe what I was seeing. They told me I was being too negative lol I thought I was giving constructive feedback.
Good points though, appreciate your thoughts,
Lee
-
Wouldn't the numbers be indicative of quality?
Yes... but not always...
The numbers could be skewed by paid links or other links that were not given on the basis of merit.
Also, the numbers can be skewed by time. Older content has had a long time to accumulate links but new content - that is superior - is just getting started.
New content that is superior can rank very low but climb the SERPs over time as its quality is recognized.
The perspective above is for two content sites competing against one another.
For retail sites a comparison of "numbers" can be more important.... however, once you start putting desirable, informative, tweetable, likeable, linkable content on a retail site it gains an enormous advantage over competitors (who do not have that type of asset) in its ability to climb the SERPs.
-
Thanks for your advice Egol always appreciative of your insight
Am new here so my question was more from the perspective of getting a feel for the tools and how to use them.
Before using SEOmoz all of my data was taken from SERPS (i.e. experience, knowledge and hunches) and am hoping that the tools would compliment this.
Elaborating somewhat on your second paragraph:
Wouldn't the numbers be indicative of quality?
I'd also prefer to take a balanced view, I'm sure you do this too, by taking both into consideration, the numbers and the quality of the content, which of course I can only do with sufficient knowledge of the tools.
Thanks, Lee
-
Rather than looking at these numbers, consider going to the SERPs and look at the pages and sites that you would like to defeat. Then ask.... can I build better content? .... can I build a better website?
If you can do these things you will have greater success than chasing numbers... and if you have success by chasing numbers but are defeated by higher quality content or higher quality websites then the numbers that you must chase will escalate over time as your competitors gain natural strength.
-
Thanks Kyle,
like what you said about "void of any helpful context in and of itself. The more meaningful data is the underlying metrics of the pages competing"
Shame .......... was hoping for a faster starting point, but I guess it always boils to drilling down and defining the data.
Thanks
-
"In other words if it says "70%" but the site I'm trying to rank is already IN spots 1-10 somewhere this is much different than trying to pick keywords for a brand new site and getting it to rank from scratch."
Thanks Dan, this is what I'm trying to determine, most of my business comes from new sites, so while they have a little age, from the sense of rankings I'm trying to identify new phrases on sites with no previous seo.
Would have been a little more helpful if that percentage gave me a better idea of the impact on a new site, but I guess we can't have it all.
Thanks for the tip though will certainly broaden my search, perhaps look for moderate to low, but as you advise, look for weak off-page competitors.
Cheers, Lee
-
The only way that those overall percentage makes sense is if you have experience ranking terms at different difficulties. At least that's what I've found. It's generally accurate but void of any helpful context in and of itself. The more meaningful data is the underlying metrics of the pages competing, specifically:
- Domain & page strength
- Number of in-bound links with matching anchor text
- How many times the pages have been liked, shared, +1'd and tweeted
- Unique C-Block IP's linking to the page
- On-page keyword targeting.
Those factors are what the overall percentage is trying to convey, but it's generally just good to use as a starting point -- SEO is meaningless without context!
-
Hi Lee
By percentage do you mean when it says for example "57% highly competitive"? And not sure what you mean by "wording moderate" could you elaborate?
I generally look at the percentage to get a basic feel for how hard it might be to rank well for that keyword. I use this is a general guide as you have to dig into the metrics to get a real sense of how hard it is to rank. And it depends on your situation.
In other words if it says "70%" but the site I'm trying to rank is already IN spots 1-10 somewhere this is much different than trying to pick keywords for a brand new site and getting it to rank from scratch.
Or if all the top sites are ranking more because of on-page factors than off page (links and social) I know there's a good chance you can beat them, because on-site is easier to fix.
Hope that helps
-Dan
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
-
Which is the best Keyword Difficulty to work?
i want to know which is the best keyword difficulty to work because i work on KD 15 as well but i still cant getting ranking, for example, my keyword is on cricket website Zim vs Pak 2020 live streaming how i do work to rank this if this keyword is KD15
Keyword Research | | Pet030 -
Local keywords still relevant?
Now with Google localizing search increasingly personalizing queriesquery results, is it still necessary to add geo-specific modifiers to keywords? [reworded for clarity]
Keyword Research | | SSFCU0 -
Keywords for fabrication (welding) company??
I've been tasked with finding the keywords for our website. The difficulty I'm finding is receiving help from the fabrication personal to suggest keywords. I'm not sure if its peoples imagination or if there's a general unwillingness. Can anyone make any suggestions here? Is there a fabrication or welding keyword database I can put to them and hopefully get their brains working? Or even a way to see what keywords our competitors use?
Keyword Research | | Resolver1010 -
Keyword with or without stress?
hi to everyone, I'm new here I'm doing some research for keywords related to sofa in brazil. Portuguese use lot of stress in writing words. there are many important keywords that should be written with the stress. For example: sofás but I'm measuring many more researches for the same word without stress (see attachment). This is the same for many other key phrases with 2 or 3 words. in 90% of the case, key phrases without stress has many more researches Now I have 3 questions: results are very similar for these two keys. are really two different keys or are they the same for google? what number to keep for total search? the higher? the sum between the two? what keywords I have to use in the pages? "sofás" is the correct one, but "sofas" has many more research? U1sYe.png
Keyword Research | | eriksatie0 -
Where do you Peoples Get Keyword Ideas?
Hey everybody, I thought I would get your opinions on the sites where you like to mine keyword phrases. Before determining competition, I like to get ideas from the Adwords Tool, Keyword Optimizer Pro (a Google suggest scraper), Insights, Trends, and by looking at the phrases competitors are optimized for. How about you guys? Jared
Keyword Research | | JaredBroker5 -
How do I balance conflicting keyword research tools?
We've been using Wordtracker for years to find viable long tail keyword options. Lately, we've begun to doubt the true usefulness of this tool. We have implemented good optimization efforts using relevant keywords that Wordtracker suggests as reasonably well-searched with relatively low competition. Even when we rank well for these words, we get no traffic for them. Subsequent checking of these words in Google AdWords reveal that Google has found no searches for these words at all. Suspicious, we've begun cross-checking our keywords in AdWords and the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool. But now I keep getting contradictory reports. For example, a keyword I recently checked reported thus: In Wordtracker: high competition and low search In AdWords: high competition and decent search In Moz: only moderately competitive Who do I believe? How do other people weight the opinions of the various keyword research tools?
Keyword Research | | MackenzieFogelson0 -
Is "in" a keyword differentiator?
Does google view phrases with "in" in then as different keywords than the same phrase without an "in"? For example: is "great restaurants in chicago" the same keyword as "great restaurants chicago"? Whenever I do research on two phrases like this, they always come up with the same search volume.
Keyword Research | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Effective keyword grouping - any suggestions?
I have a specific question regarding keyword grouping. Whenever I've have compiled a (long) list of keywords, I create smaller groups of keywords that can be targeted by a category or page. However, I find this to be quite labour-intensive as I'm doing this work manually through filtering in Excel. To illustrate what I mean, here's an example of a keyword list: baby shirt
Keyword Research | | DeptAgency
t-shirt for baby
pregnancy shirts
pregnancy gifts Normally I would create a list of root words, like this: baby
shirt
pregnancy
gift I would then manually filter the list on each root word and copy the filtered list to separate tabs, which would result in lists like this: baby
baby shirt
t-shirt for baby shirt
baby shirt
t-shirt for baby
pregnancy shirts etc. As you can imagine, this is a lot of work. So my hope is that you can help me out with a smart tool / Excel formula / ??? to automate this process. Thanks for any suggestions!0