Keyword Difficulty Tool - How to use it the best way?

[TaniBogi]

Hi,

I am freshman, both, here on SEOmoz and in SEO generally and have a question concerning the assessment of KW difficulty. I did browse through the Q&A-Section (great content!!) but could not find a relevant answer to my problem.

So I am currently building my initial keyword list, our website is only 2 months old, so we are still in the very early stage. Fashion is a very competitive area, so the KW Diff. Tool indicates high difficulty for a lot of words and phrases. however, I identified some with percentages <50 or even lower than that. Then I compared the results of the SEOmoz tool to Google Adwards and the Google results for competitiveness differed significantly.

For example: for the  KW Personal Shopping I got KWD from Seomoz 33% (in Germany) and from Google 0,5 for broad and 0,64 for exact search. I am quite confused how to make the right choices for my KWs now.

• Which metrics should I consider most?

• What else apart from the competition factor is behind the metric KW diff.?

• Does it matter in any way that I search from Germany for Germany in German?

• Do you have any further recommendations for the process of identifying the best Kws?

Thanks a lot in advance, best from Berlin

Tani

[allurez]

Does this tool still work with Google results? I'm seeing that regardless of what search engine I choose from the drop down that in the results portion of the page it always says "Bing Search Volume" leading me to believe that the keyword difficulty portion is also in terms of Bing searches.

Thank you,

[mario33]

Hi Ressler - Thanks for the great anwer here. I see that you are in the auto industry and have a question for you. I'm new at SEO and have been analyzing some sites in the travel space.  In doing so, I came across an auto site recently founded by some ex-Tripadvisor guys which is called carguru.com, which is getting ranked for lots of terms. Any clue has to how they've done this in such a competitive space like auto?? I wanted to understand their tactics and see if they could be applied to the travel space.

Thanks for your time. The Moz community is awesome.

[TaniBogi]

Dear community,

thanks a lot for your help! The Q&A Forum works perfectly!

Best Tani

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Tanja,

Keep in mind that the Adword Keyword tool is meant for advertising, so the "competition" is thought to be a better measure of paid competition, not the organic rankings you are trying to achieve.

The best approach is to use the KW difficulty tool to analyze the competition. Look at all the metrics. Run a complete report for your top keywords. Are the competitors pages properly optimized? Can you beat them anywhere? Pay close attention to title tags and inbound anchor text, as these carry a lot of weight.

I still get most of my ideas from Google's tool, at least as a starting point. I then try to find modifies that I can more easily rank for. There are 3 types of modifiers I can think of off the top of my head:

Let's use the keyword "running shoes" for example:

Type Modifier: "Wholesale Running Shoes"

Location Modifier: "Running Shoes Germany"

Date Modifier: "Running Shoes 2012"

By optimizing my page around specific modifiers (and you often can't find these in Google Adwords) you can rank more easily for given keywords. The more specific, the better.

[Group16]

Hey Tanja,

I had the same question as you when I first got started here on SeoMoz... What does difficulty number mean? (me looks at Rand :P) There seems to be no explanation on here. So I had to ask myself is 40% high, what about 50%, 60%? In reality, these numbers don't mean much. The best way to assess competitivness of a keyword is to look at the chart shown below the difficulty score. In essence if you can match number of root domain backlinks/backlinks/authority as the number 1 guy then you have really good chance of ranking well (not always the case, but generally that holds true)...

Also, keep in mind that Google Adwords metrics is derived from paid ads, which very often doesn't necessary correlated with the difficulty of ranking organically.

[ResslerMotors]

Welcome Tani!

As you could probably guess by my name, I work in the auto industry.  Which you would assume is pretty competitive.  Well, when I do my keyword research in the Google Keyword Tool, I'm greeted with .9's usually.  This sounds extremely daunting, but it really isn't that bad.  When I hop onto the keyword tool that SeoMoz offers, I get a 34%.  Now, that sounds really friendly!

So, my strategy is to generate my keyword list in the Google Keyword Tool, download the CSV and use excel to manipulate the data.  Once I discover the keywords I want, I run them through the keyword tool here at SeoMoz.  I know there is a way to just automatically do all this in Excel, but I've learned that I really don't know how to code in it.  Anyway, I then copy over the stats I get from here to the excel sheet for another column of data.  Finally, I look at what might be worth ranking for, in the short time, out of those keywords.  From there I will visit the top 10 sites, and see if they are doing things correctly for on page.

Depending on that stat, and my current websites stats, I will decide to go after a keyword or not.