Keyword difficulty report - am I stupid??

[EmmaGrey]

Hi, Im a programmer but SEO newbie and I am trying out Moz Pro.

To be honest I feel really disheartened right now, I find the world of SEO very difficult and full of conflicting information.

Anyway, I am trying to get my head around the Keyword difficulty tool in order to determine what keyword I want to go after and what I would need to do in order to outrank the competitors.

The website with the highest PA, most external links to the domain (4000 versus around 80-90), the most linking root domain and the best on page optimasations ranks nr 5.

The website that ranks 1 is the only one with good social signals.

All of the websites has the keyword in the page title.

What am I missing? This makes no sense to me. Is this Keyword tool reliable?

VERY grateful for any help from you guys..

/Emma

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Emma,

I feel your frustration. Unfortunately, we don't know all the ways in which Google's algorythm works, although we have a pretty good idea of many pieces of the puzzle.

Even the highest correlated metric we know of, PageAuthority, only has a correlation of about 0.35 (1.00 being a perfect correlation). Pretty good for SEO, but in the real world it's not the best correlation.

So the factors in the keyword difficulty tool are known ranking influences, but it's impossible to incorporate all 200+ ranking signals (some known, some unknown) into a single tool. Instead, the best way to use the tool is to use it to try to find out exactly why a page ranks above another. Is it over-optimized? What is it about those social signals that help? Are the links from relevant sources? Has the site been penalized?

Yeah, it's conflicting and confusing. In truth, the first 80% of all SEO is pretty standard: Create good content, make sure it's accessible by Search Engines, Follow best SEO practices, market it smartly, get links, repeat. Do this well and you'll win most of your battles. The remaining 20% gets hard, and if we think about it too much, we sometimes waste our time.

Regardless, the best strategy, in my opinion, is not to go after 1 keyword, but 100s at a time using a long-tail strategy. I wrote about it in more detail here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank   If you're just starting out, or even experienced, it's the best way to go.

[BrightHealth]

If you're running PA as a number, be sure to look at the www version of the domain. Some tools neglect that critical component and will display the non-www version's PA.

You are entirely right, there are many conflicting stories within the educational side of SEO. Coupled with the fact that it changes dramatically over time, you have to stick to several trusted sources (like Moz!) and focus on what is happening right now. Other than going through the SEO Guide for Beginners and Google's SEO Starter Guide.

Last count, there were 250+ ranking signals.. looking at 4-5 is usually enough to gain some insights to why sites/pages rank the way they do. If those 4-5 signals aren't telling you the story, you simply have to look deeper.