Keyword Research: Page Authority and Keyword Difficulty
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A speaker at a conference suggested using your Page Authority (of home page) number as a benchmark in keyword research to compare against keyword difficulty number.
So if you had a Page Authority score of 60, you would look for keywords with a difficulty of under 60 (using the MOZ metrics for keyword difficulty).
Has anyone used these metrics in this way? Any success?
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While Page Authority is a primary factor in measuring Keyword Difficulty, the scales are not 1:1 such that you could simply compare PA to KD and know your likelihood of ranking. However, the speaker is certainly heading in the right direction with the thought process.
What I would recommend is finding what keywords the page, or pages like it, on your site already rank in the top 3 for. Create a list in Keyword Explorer of those keywords and then look at the Average Keyword Difficulty which is shown on the Keyword Explorer Lists Dashboard. You can then use that number to determine if a keyword is worth going after because you know that your page is capable of (or not capable of) ranking for terms that difficulty.
I made a video of the process using Google Search Console to find the keywords here...
Good Luck!
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