Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

What is the best metric to evaluate keyword difficulty?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

1174

nicole.healthline last edited by

Which is better seomoz's keyword difficulty tool or wordtracker's KEI index? Or, do you have another metric you utilize when evaluating a large list of keywords?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
nicole.healthline @EGOL last edited by

That is great advice, but difficult to scale when evaluating thousands of keywords...
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
EGOL last edited by

Keyword difficulty numbers don't mean much to me.... however, if I go out to the SERPs and see big brands, government institutions, and other heavyweight sites then I can get some idea of what I am up against.

Also, I take a look at the content that is ranking and if I can create content that is vastly superior then I get a great feeling that I can win.

Who is up there and what is up there make a lot more sense to me than a number.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 2

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Image URLs - best practice

Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart

1
Can bots identify shmushed keywords?

I remember reading some years ago that domains and pages that have smushed keywords, such as cheapbaseballs.com/redbaseball.html could be identified by Google as "cheap baseballs" and "red base ball". Is this still correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO

0
Best anchor text strategy for embeddable content

Hi all We provide online services, and as part of this we provide our clients with a javascript embeddable 'widget' to place on their website. This is fairyly popular (100s-1000s of inserts on websites). The main workings of this are javascript (they spit html iframe onto the page) but we also include both a <noscript>portion (which is purely customer focused, it deep links into a relevant page on our website for the user to follow) and also a plain <a href=''></a> at the bottom, under the JS. This is all generated and inserted by the website owner. Therefore, after insertion we can dynamically update whatever the Javascript renders out, but the <noscript> and <a> at the bottom are there forever. Previously, this last plain link has been used for optimisation, with it randomly selecting 1 out of a bank of 3 different link anchor texts when the widget html is first generated. We've also recently split our website into B2B and B2C portions, so this will be linking to a newer domain with much established backlinks than the existing domain. I think we could get away with optimised keyword links on the old domain but the newer domain they will be more obvious. In light of recent G updates, we're afraid this may look spammy. We obviously want to utilise the link as best as possible, as it is used by hundreds of our clients, but don't want it to cause any issues. So my question, would you just focus on using brand name anchor text for this? Or could we mix it up with a few keyword optimised links also? If so, what sort of ratio would you suggest? Many thanks</noscript>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benseb

0
Title Tag Best Practices

In light of all the Google updates in 2013, have you updated/changed your title tag best practices? Is the format of (Keyword | Brand) still working well for your optimization efforts or have you started incorporating an approach similar to this format . (Keyword in a Sentence | Brand) Thanks in advance for your opinions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team

0
Sudden rankings drop for our most profitable keyword?

Hi, I was hoping you could help me with a troubling issue that has come up this week. We have consistently ranked in the top 3 for the keyword "grey goose glasses" for the last 12 months. We received 74 visits from this keyword from Dec 3 to Jan 3. For some reason on Jan 4th we dropped from the top 3 to somewhere around 40-70 and receive almost no traffic from this keyword an longer. The page that was ranking was http://thebottlemill.com/tbm/grey-goose-drinking-glass.html I have since changes a the Page title and URL with a 301 redirect and the H1 tag to be a better match but this was just done yesterday. We havent seemed to be effected like this on other keywords. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bottlemill

0
Best url structure

I am making a new site for a company that services many cities. I was thinking a url structure like this, website.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/cityname1-cityname2-cityname3-cityname4-cityname5. Will this be the best approach to optimize the site for the keyword plus 5 different cities ? as long as I keep the total url characters under the SeoMoz reccomended 115 characters ? Or would it be better to build separate pages for each city, trying to reword the main services to try to avoid dulpicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane9

0
Best practice?

Hi there, I have recently written an article which I have posted on an online newspaper website. I want to use this article and put it on my blog also, the reason the article will be placed on my blog is to drive users from my email marketing activities. Would it simply be best practice to disallow Google from crawling this page? or put a rel canonical on the article placed on my blog pointing to the article placed on the online newspaper website? Thanks for any suggestions
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul78

0
How to Target Keyword Permutations

I have a client that wants to rank for a keyword phrase that has many permutations.. ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort", "Hill Country Resort Alaska", "Hill Country Alaska Resort" But I'm wondering if I should target these all on the same page or not. I'm assuming all of these permutations are actually valid searches because I did my keyword research for 'exact match' keywords and got results like this.. (let me know if I'm missing something here, or if this sounds right) [Alaska Hill Country Resort] - 230 Local Searches [Hill Country Resort Alaska] - 140 Local Searches [Hill Country Alaska Resort] - 30 Local Searches The phrase we're targeting is their main keyword phrase, so I've chosen their home-page as the page to rank for this phrase. My thought is to optimize for the most popular phrase (ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort"), and sprinkle in the other phrases throughout the copy. Next I would run a link-building campaign targeting the main phrase first.. then the next phrase, and so on, so that my anchor text is more heavily focused on the more popular terms, but I would also make sure to include the less popular terms. Do you think this is the best way to go about this? Do I really need to make individual pages for each of the permutations, or is it okay to target them all on one page since they are essentially the same keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing56

0