What is the ideal keyword difficulty percentage?

[mmookie]

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%??

[smonnes]

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.

[softclick]

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

[mmookie]

Thank you so much Ben - this help a lot!

[BenFox]

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.