What does 70% Keyword Difficulty mean in reality?
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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)
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Competitor Ranks Top Keywords Without Backlinks
One of my competitors is ranking very well for many different competitive keywords (1k+ searches per month). I'm trying to figure out how in the world he is ranking so well. I've signed up for MozPro and looked at his back-links. He has 1 branded site-wide back-link from a decent blog. He also has 1 contextual back-link from a decent blog. Other than these 2 back-links, the rest are garbage links unlikely to even count for anything (he has maybe 12 of these low quality back-links). My website on the other hand has more than 15 back-links from different (high quality) websites and does not rank anywhere near this competitor. This leads me to believe that either MozPro back-link reporting is inadequate or there is foul-play on the part of my competitor. As far as on-page SEO is considered, his website is far inferior. Therefore, I highly doubt this would play a role. What are some reasonable approaches I can take to better understand the cause of this discrepancy. Clearly the back-link reporting has not revealed any answers.
Competitive Research | | poke10 -
How can you rank nr 1 for high competitive keyword with low DA and only 1 backlink?
Hi! Was wondering if anyone can explain this a bit clearer...
Competitive Research | | AleksanderOlsen
Image attatched... How is it possible to rank on Google Norway for spot nr.1 (page in English language) and spot nr.2 (page in Norwegian language) , when all you competitors have higher PA, DA and a lot more backlinks and better on-page optimization according to MOZ? Is there something I´m misunderstanding?
Just when I thought SEO started to make sense 😞 7sXH00d0 -
Ranking for Competitive Keywords vs. Less Competitive Keyword Variations
I'm curious about situations where a website ranks very well for query variations, but doesn't rank for the query itself (or the reverse of that). For Redfin (where I work), here is the situation with regard to keyword rankings on Google (searched today from USA, incognito)... real estate search - #4 real estate online - #4 real estate site - #5 find real estate - #9 get real estate - #16 real estate - #163 It stands to reason that a site ranking well for a competitive query should also rank well for less competitive query variations - especially query variations that are non-limiting and do not demand a custom landing page (for example, I would consider 'board games' to dramatically limit the query 'games' and be best targeted with a targeted page...not so with 'real estate site' and 'real estate'). So, my question is, what are some theories regarding situations like this? Why do some sites rank so well for competitive queries but not for non-limiting query variations? Why aren't the sites that are crushing us for 'real estate' also crushing us for 'real estate' variations (to be clear...the top sites are crushing us for both)? Is it anchor text? Is it social signals? Is it offline signals, co-occurrence, or citations? What about internal linking and site structure? I realize it's likely a mix of all this, but I'm hoping we can drum up some new ideas here. FYI, on Bing we also rank very well for 'real estate' variations, but leap up to 31st for 'real estate'. Thoughts?
Competitive Research | | RyanOD0 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Competitor research: No data / results displaying on Keyword tools, Aexa
Hi there! I'm trying to research a few competitors using various Keyword tools (SEM Rush, Compete, Keyword Spy -- even Alexa for high level insight). While the bulk of the competitors generate expected results through these tools (a smattering of their top organic and paid search keywords, some traffic estimations through Alexa), ONE of these competitors lists "No results" across all categories and all tools: http://www.bgstar.ca Despite this, we know that they invest heavily in search -- and my SEM Rush toolbar indicates that they have a Google PR of 5 (though I recognize that that should be taken with a grain of salt). So I'm stumped! Has anyone encountered this before? Is there something structural that they might be doing, that's blocking not only Google-based platforms, but Alexa too? Thanks for your help!
Competitive Research | | MACJ0 -
Why is different the difficulty of a keyword in Google Spain and Google mexico?
In your opinion, Which are the main reasons of this difference?
Competitive Research | | BorjaUrreta910 -
Trying to rank against keyword in domain
I am trying to rank for let's say the keyword "their site" , my competitor has theirsite.com, with next to no seo but are ranking #1 , my site lets say is mysite.com/their-site my site is about the same age and has a PR of 4,their site has a PR of 0 and 2 backlinks, how difficult will it be to get to number 1, am at spot # 5 in google now. Thanks David
Competitive Research | | David750 -
Are there any tools to extract keywords and long tail keywords from a site and report keyword density by URL?
I need a tool that does the following: Find exact matches for keywords in content of sites and report keyword density by URL. Then identify the value generated by a particular keyword.
Competitive Research | | MotionPoint0