What is keyword difficulty

[slrana]

I see in SEOmoz ..........there is a keyword research tool which show keyword difficulty.............

I want to know about keyword difficulty and what i understood after seeing this result

[cotuvettheo]

Can anyone tell that if my difficulty 19 against my keyword then how many backlinks required to achieve #1 rank?

[MNA]

can u give give me the limit criteria of "keyword difficulty". .  .like is keyword difficulty of lie between "0 - 100" or "1 to 100" or "1 to 1000", etc.

[KLLC]

Keyword difficulty identifies how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword. and the value is higher for more popular words because it will be more difficult to compete with 1,000s of other sites for a popular word than with 10s of others for the less popular ones.

[danatanseo]

Hi sirana, Keyword Difficulty is a calculation done by the SEOMoz research tool that takes into account a number of things including: competition (how many pages are currently ranking for that particular term), how many people are bidding on the term in paid search, how expensive are the clicks and how many people are actually searching for the term online.

I'm not quite sure mathematically how SEOMoz puts all these things together, but it calculates a percentage score that gives you an indication of how hard it's going to be to rank highly for any given term. Obviously, the ideal scenario would be to find keywords with a lot of searches, but low competition. In that case, it would be much easier to compete and rise to the top. The worst scenario is if you have keywords with very few searches being done for those terms, but with a lot of competition.

In SEOMoz, the higher the percentage for Keyword Difficulty, the harder it could be to rank well for that term. The lower the percentage, the easier it might be to rank for that term. That being said, depending on the quality of your site and your content, it could be that you rank really well for a highly competitive, difficult keyword, but maybe not so well for a keyword that SEOMoz identified as easier.

I hope this helps!

Dana