Hi SimplyNutrients! A subdomain will still beat an entirely separate domain. Sometimes it can even be treated the same as a subfolder on the main domain. For the best shot at that, do what you can to make the navigation, the footer, the design, the UX, etc. match the main site -- some combination of those seem to be what matter to Google on this front.

Best of luck!

A) Generally yes, but hard to say for certain. There are correlations suggesting that maybe some of them do pass influence in some way.

B) Probably, but again, likely based on engagement, i.e. if a social link gets very little engagement, it probably won't do much to influence search rankings, but if it gets a lot, it often seems to have at least some positive impact.

Yup! All the case studies I showed above (and plenty since) have demonstrated that you can boost traffic by moving from the subdomain to a subfolder.

Hi Varun - I'd say it's mildly valuable, not super important. If you can, and it's easy, go for it. If you're struggling to do so, don't worry about it. Neither search engines nor users are too picky about stopword removal in URLs.

Thanks LAJ! I'll ask the team to look into these straightaway.

Hi LAJ - could you give some examples of the keywords where Google is showing search volume but Moz isn't? We may be able to figure out what's going on from that.

Yes! We've had this ability since day one Just click "create or upload a new list" and you can create a list of hundreds or even thousands of keywords for analysis and comparison all at once.

Thanks Greg - I hear you on the comparison graphic side. I'll see what we can do about upgrading the UI/UX of that longer term.

Hi Greg - totally hear you, but strongly, strongly disagree

I worked personally on the scores for both and I can promise that the old KW Difficulty tool's numbers just aren't right. The old tool frequently over or understates the difficulty of ranking, and it relies on metrics that are outdated (age of domain? yech). I would strongly advise you to switch to using the metrics from KW Explorer. They're more accurate, the spread is better (the old KW Difficulty tool scrunches up scores so almost everything is between 30-70, when it really should be a wider spread), the other metrics are way more useful (CTR % and volume), and the accuracy of the metrics fetches is solid too (sometimes, old KW Difficulty doesn't even grab data correctly).

A few examples:

• "Harry Potter" - old tool says 80, KW Explorer says 89 (not a huge difference, but you can see what I mean about the scrunching effect -- clearly this KW should be one of the highest difficulties possible)
• "calendar app" - old tool says 62, KW Explorer says 76 (on a hand review, I think we'd all agree 76 is far more accurate; this is a very tough keyword)
• "northwest moss garden examples" - old tool says 47, KW Explorer says 33 (this is one of the easier keywords out there, with lots of low DA sites in the results; I think 33 is far more indicative of reality)

I know it's tough to make a switch or trust something new, but having studied these both closely and worked on the design of the metrics and data for both, I can assure you KW Explorer's Difficulty metrics are head and shoulders above the old tool.

It's not best practice for sure, and it doesn't help with SEO (ideally, you want clean, clear, descriptive URLs and paths). That said, if Google can index the content of the page (or the image), it's not a dealbreaker. You can check by using the URL/image path in Google Images e.g. this one.

I'd highly doubt it. You're spending energy getting a redirect linked-to and indexed, rather than the URL you actually want to rank. Point those links and that effort to the page itself and you'll get a far better return.

The shortened URLs will pass any link equity they have to their target, but using a shortener to link to has no added benefit, and the 301 redirect will actually cost you some PageRank leakage according to Google.

Either we haven't crawled any links that point to #2, or the links we've seen to it don't pass any link equity (e.g. they're nofollowed or on pages with meta robots=nofollow, etc).

Hi Monu - shortened URLs generally aren't going to accrue much PA (or much link equity), because many (most) folks who link to them won't link to the shortener but to the URL it resolves to.

I'd also say that there's almost no circumstance I can imagine where it's actually useful or desirable to have a high PA score (or high ranking ability) for the shortened URL. You want the URL that actually resolves -- the one Google will show in its listings -- to get all the links. Shorteners could go out of business or stop redirecting properly or change from 301s to something else to track clicks, and then you'd lose that link equity to the final target. Thus, always better to have it go to the resolved URL.

Hi Chris - yes! We know about this bug with the different tabs/windows and have a ticket in to the dev team to address. Thanks for the heads up.

Yes indeed! Check out https://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started/campaign-setup

Hi Stayfirst - yes, you can certainly use the location-specific keyword as a jumping-off point. For example, I tried "Seattle Real Estate" and there's loads of good suggestions and a campaign I can build off the keywords that come out of that.

And yes - you're totally right that getting national rankings when you only serve one area could be a bad thing, as the engagement rate of those visitors would quickly tell Google you're probably not relevant for the majority of them. Way better to target the area you're aiming for (and vastly less difficult too).

Howdy gang,

This is my last discussion post in the series on keyword metrics in KW Explorer & Moz Pro (previously on Keyword Difficulty, Opportunity, & Volume). In this one, let's chat about the "Priority Score," a feature you'll find in Keyword Explorer on any lists you build.

Priority was conceived to help aggregate all the other metrics - Difficulty, Opportunity, Volume, and (if you choose to use it) Importance. We wanted to create an easy way to sort keywords so the cream would rise to the top -- cream in this case being keywords with low difficulty, high opportunity, strong volume, and high importance (again, if you choose to use it). Thus, when it comes to Priority Score, there's no particular number you should necessarily seek out, but higher is better.

When you get into the ranges of 80+ (which is quite rare, Single Malt Scotch is one of the few examples I could find, and only because it's volume is so high and there's only a couple SERP features), you're generally talking about keywords with high demand (lots of monthly searches), the difficulty isn't too crazy (a website in the 55-80 DA range might have a shot), and the CTR Opportunity is decently strong (usually not too many SERP features that take clicks and attention away from the organic web results). Below that score range, you're usually finding keywords where one or more of those isn't true -- there's either lower volume, heavier competition, or lots of SERP features with the accompanying lower estimated CTR.

When you're building KW lists, my view is that there's no "good" or "bad" Priority scores, only relative scores. Priority should be used to help you determine which terms and phrases to target first -- it's like a cheat code to unlock the low hanging fruit. If you build large lists of 50-100 or more keywords, Priority is a powerful and easy way to sort. It becomes even more useful if you use the Importance score to help add an estimation of value to you/your business/your client in to the mix. In that case, Importance can cut Priority by up to 2/3rds (if you set it at 1) or raise it by a little more than 3X (if you set it at 10). This is hyper-useful to nudge keywords with middling scores up if they're super-important to your marketing efforts.

Look forward to your feedback, and thanks for checking these out!