Can I calculate "Keyword Difficulty" metric using Mozscape API data?

[brchap]

We already have a web application that pulls certain metrics about websites using the Mozscape API, but we are wanting to extend the usefulness of this application to enable users of the app to pull "Keyword Difficulty" metrics in bulk, instead of one at a time (or 5 at a time).

I wouldn't mind the 5 at a time limitation if we could just automate the API calls and let the tool pull data for 50 or so keywords without user-interaction.

I know that it's a "formula", but I don't know what SEOMoz uses for it's formula.

Has anyone figured out a way to calculate this, based on the Mozscape API data?  Has anyone ever tried to reverse engineer this metric?

[JesseCWalker]

Absolutely!  Wow.  I'd pay for that.  Good luck on the project!

[brchap]

Unfortunately, the web app is still in development and not available for public use yet. The database is shared, so anyone on the app would be seeing everyone else's data... You can probably see the problem with this.

In the end, we will make it capable of handling multiple users, but it's not there yet. As far as the keyword difficulty, there is no API call to pull this metric so we are wanting to reverse engineer it.

Jesse, we are like you... We can (most of the time) estimate keyword difficulty, based on various metrics, domain age, title tags, on-page keyword density, etc. But, we were wondering if anyone has effectively automated this in such a way that keywords could be "graded" in bulk. Once we can do that... Wow.

[JesseCWalker]

What is your web application?  I'd love to try it out.   It sounds fantastic.

I've used the mozscap API a bit for research projects but I don't believe 'keyword difficulty' is an available datapoint.  I haven't had any success trying to scale the usage of the keyword difficulty metric to large lists of keywords.

So I did try to create my own metric using the API.  I basically would importXML the serp results for the keyword then run the resulting URL's against the API to return things like DA, title tag, etc.  From these I built a simple algorithm to judge the difficulty of the keyword.

I'm no developer so the result was a rather cumbersome excel file.   But I could get a sense of keyword difficulty en masse this way.  In the end I decided that is better to simply narrow my keyword list down and then run it manually through the keyword difficulty tool (5 at time, ugh!).