What % is a GO when using the Keyword difficulty tool?
-
Hi,
A lot of keywords I have looked into say 'moderately competitive' at around 35% - 45%.
But what else would you look at in the table to decide whether or not the keyword term is achievable and how do you decide this maybe its the root domain backlinks and maybe you would only touch it if it had less then 30.
Basically what other elements do you look at when deciding whether to pursue?
This might also include some research in Google itself (although most the data you would want is in the tool, well I think anyway!
Cheers
-
You have to do your own testing / look back at your old rankings.
It took me X amount of time to achieve 35% difficulty
It took me X amount of time to achieve 45% difficulty
It took me X amount of time to achieve 55% difficulty
It took me X amount of time to achieve 65% difficulty
Above 75% difficulty you will need to be working with an aged authority domain or be a true ninja.
-
I have two philosophies that are rather contrarian.....
-
Instead of paying attention to the KW difficulty number, go out to the SERPs and look at the content of the top ten websites. If you can beat their content then attack with everything that you got. Great content, given a little visibility, will defeat SEO over time.
-
Do not fear competition, because where there is heavy competition there also usually heavy traffic and where there is heavy traffic there is also lots of money changing hands. Attack heavy competition with high quality content that is long and engaging... and that will attract links and pull traffic on long-tail queries.
-
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
-
Tools for constant SERP monitoring?
Does anyone know of a tool where you enter in a [search term] and it constantly (or periodically) monitors the SERPs and reports back on the top results? IE- If you wanted to monitor for the term [trump] it would fetch that search result every hour or so and report those via an online interface or downloadable .csv
Competitive Research | | Cox-Media-Group0 -
What are the pros and cons of putting all content under directory named after target keyword?
The question sounds complicated but is actually quite simple. We want to rank high for the keyword "publicity". Here are some facts: Google Keyword Research: Competition 0.02 & Global monthly searches: 22,200 SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool: highly competitive We are producing plenty of editorial content every day on our online magazine which right now resides under http://mag.publiseek.com and we are thinking of renaming the magazine: "Publicity" and moving it to http://publiseek.com/publicity That way every new article will be under the publicity subdirectory. Of course we would redirect all the existing articles under the old structure to the new one using 301's. And we're hoping that with time we get the top position for the keyword publicity. I am interested to hear from the experts out there what are the pros and cons of this approach?
Competitive Research | | davhad0 -
What is a desirable range for a keyword's difficulty rating?
Hi all! I am new to the world of SEO and just getting started. As I am doing keyword research I am consistently finding difficulty ratings in the 40%-50% range. Is this considered a "par" rating or should I be looking for "a longer tail" rating? Thanks
Competitive Research | | jclayton180 -
Any Tool for Tracking Domain / Page Authority Growth?
Is there any tool available in the market where there is a ranking list of fastest growth in Domain and Page Authority? I launched a job site 8 months ago and I am curious to see what % of websites (not just job specific) have experienced faster growth in a similar time frame in Domain and Page Authority to get a sense of what may have been accomplished. thank you very much,
Competitive Research | | knielsen0 -
Determining why an established competitor's rankings have bombed - What's the best way to go about it?
I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages. I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too. **What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? ** I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No? Thanks guys
Competitive Research | | Martin_S0 -
Your Favorite Tools for Competitive Analysis?
When you review your competitors online presence, what are some of your favorite tools? I like Open Site Explorer's domain comparison tool. SEMRush is great too but the data is often inaccurate.
Competitive Research | | qlkasdjfw0 -
My competition is using 1px images and links without anchor text. Good or bad idea?
I've been scoping out some of my competition and I noticed the number 1 ranking site is doing a lot of "interesting" stuff. I saw a bunch of 1px blank images that they must be using for the alt tag keywords. I also noticed several links to internal pages with different keywords without anchor text so they don't actually appear on the page. Is this considered black hat? Should I be doing something similar? It feels like the work I'm doing to try to rank #1 with a clean/professional looking site are wasted when the #1 sites are doing things like this.
Competitive Research | | technota0 -
Is there a tool that could list all high PR pages of a domain?
Is there a tool that could list all high PR pages of a domain? Ideally, non subscripton based but if the tool is awesome then I wouldn't hesitate forking out for it.
Competitive Research | | rmteamseo0