What does 70% Keyword Difficulty mean in reality?

[johnzhel]

I did a quick search in SEOmoz keyword difficuilty tool and found out most of the keyword I pick with some nice traffic are all 70%. Keyword list:  http://screencast.com/t/Y4pPK42ZXrST

How "difficult" is 70%?

If someone ask you to optimize and rank a (very) new website for a keyword with 70% difficulty:

Will you take the challedge or you think mission impossible? Why? How do you relate this reletively abstract "number" to the real world?

Thank you!

[johnzhel]

Wow, that IS good! I like the free copy of Declaration of Independence etc. idea a lot

There is a translation company behind the website and the targeted audiences are people who need professional services to translate their documents / websites accurately.

I like the free translation tool idea as well - to get some browers' traffic - hopefully pick up some buyers from there. It is actually not too difficuilt or expensive to produce. We could use Google Translate API if they did not shut it down, but I believe there are other API available.

Based on your suggestion, we are going to offer webmasters free translation copies of their important web pages right away. Do you have any suggestions where to fish? (for high quality websites) We need to find webmasters who are honest and will keep their words to put up our links on their pages. I mean people could have taken our translation and NOT add our links there - and we can not do anything about it if that happens.

The cost to translate a typial web page is $30~$50. So if we can get a permanent link on a deep subpage of a quality website, it is worth to do it, is that right?. The big assumption is the our link will be put up there and will stay there as long as the page exists.

[EGOL]

Translation isn't my field of expertise... but if I was going to attack it I would want a free translation tool.  However, I know that those are very expensive to produce.

Short of that, if I was ignorantly going to attack it I would got a large number of  important documents that are relatively short but of interest to worldwide scholars.  These might  be documents such as the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence and translate them into various languages.  Then I would offer these translated copies as .pdf documents to professors and institutions to place on their website.  Each of these would have an attribution link or two in it that points to my website.

If this worked I would continue producing those documents and distributing them for free.  You might also offer free or discount translation service to webmasters who would like to have a few important pages of their website in another language.  Each of these would have an attribution link.

I would also study the backlinks of some competitors to see where they are coming from.  Perhaps they have a strategy that you can employ.

Another method that I have done is to simply buy one of the top ranking websites.  It can be a lot more economical than defeating them.

[johnzhel]

For this particular case, it is a typical translation service provider - nothing for people crazy about.

But you check list inpires me on the next project I will pick up. I will pin your list on my office wall, and read it a few times every day  

Thank you!

[johnzhel]

Thank you EGOL! As a guru, you may set your goal as #1 postion. For us, top 10 or even top 20 positions could make us happy,**  simply because**: about  50% of the top 10 websites listed on Google for those  keywords in my question are  automatic translation tools. When a visitor looks for professional translation services, he has to scroll down the ranking page  to find a real company to do that for him,  even go to the second ranking page for that.

Can you offer some advices on that case -- strategies to rank for  top 10-20 for 70% difficulty keywords? Now the website (6 months old) is ranked between postion #80 to #120 for those competitive keyword phrases.

[johnzhel]

Great advices!

When you look for some less competitive phrases, do you have a upper limit when you do that? Say 50%, 40% or 30% difficuilty at  max to start with a generally new website? (new = a few months old)

[firstconversion]

Could be easy or near to impossible

• How good is your product?
• What is you products USP?
• Is it viral?
• Does it naturally acquire backlinks and social shares as part of its operation?
• Are you going to be able to create amazing stories and content from it to promote it?
• How much creative freedom do you have to promote?
• Are people going to hit your website and go "OMG this is amazing"?

When I see these types of questions, I think the the answer is normally to go back to the product level and engineer a product that wins for you

[EGOL]

I think that you can only really appreciate a difficulty of 70% if you already have a site that is ranking at TopSERPs for a similar term.

If somebody came to me with a brand new site and wanted a #1 position for a 70% keyword I would know that there will be an awful lot of work going into it and that a #1 position might be impossible to obtain depending upon who is already there and who might launch after we begin.

This is not a KW that you will compete for at the $1000/month level.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I look at numbers like that and consider goals.  If my long term goal is to compete at that level, and if I think there's going to be a lot of work involved, I'll seed my site and all my SEO methods with a mix of those phrases and others that aren't as competitive.  I'll work on all of it over time.

I may start out only seeing results on less competitive phrases, yet as that happens, that alone will help build toward the long term more challenging phrases also gaining ground.

PPC can be a relatively fast way to get visibility for those more difficult phrases, and that can buy me some time on the organic side.

this strategy has worked for countless clients I've used it on.

Also, it's just one metric.  Under the current landscape it may appear they have a difficulty of 70.  Yet that could be because all competitors in that niche market for that phrase are mediocre.  If none stand out, that's a golden opportunity for me to get past the perceived wall.