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Keyword Difficulty Checker UPDATE

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Free Keyword difficulty checker.

The Google keyword planner is a starting point for many, when performing keyword research. The downside of this approach? Well the Google keyword tool is designed for Google Ads. That being said, you can get some interesting SEO metrics, including search volume, keyword trends, suggested keywords and in some cases CPC to get a better understanding of the potential keyword conversion rate. This information is all very helpful, but the key metrics that is missing for a thorough SEO analysis is keyword difficulty.

keyword difficulty checker

What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is a SEO metric designed to help you understand how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. Multiple factors including organic search competition, backlinks and domain authority are analysed to calculate the keyword difficulty score for a particular search query. Based on this score you have a pretty strong indication of what it takes to compete with the websites currently ranking on the first page of Google.

How to use the difficulty checker?

  • Enter 1 or multiple keywords (up to 10 keywords).
  • Hit the “Perform Check” button.
  • The tool returns the keyword difficulty score on a 0 – 100 scale,
    [The closer to a 100 the harder it is to rank for the keyword].
  • After analyzing the keyword difficulty score you can export the results to excel for further analysis.

How use keyword difficulty for SEO?

After collecting the keyword difficulty score for a keyword, you need to determine if your website is able to compete with the current top 10 search results.

A step-by-step approach to put the keyword difficulty score into perspective: 1). Select you’re best performing (non branded) keywords that drive most traffic to your website 2). Run these keywords trough the tool and collect the keyword difficulty scores 3). Compare these scores to those from your research. This data provides you with a good indication of the keyword difficulty scores that are in range for your website. (Make sure the comparison is based on topically related keywords).

New / low authority website

If you have a new website, it is advised to target low difficulty score keywords or long-tail keywords. These keywords generally have less search competition and also a lower search volumes.

High authority website

If you’re performing keyword research for an established website that is already ranking for competitive keywords, you’re chances increase to successfully target related keywords.

Keyword difficulty index

Score

Description / explanation

0 – 15

Easy, these keyword combinations are easy to target because there is not much competition. In most cases this will also mean the monthly search volume might be quite low. These keyword combinations are interesting to target, if they are highly relevant for your business.

>15 – 30

Relatively easy, these keyword combinations have a little more organic competition, but are still in range for new websites and are therefore relatively easy to target.

>30 – 50

Average, in most case these keywords are no longer nice keyword combinations and have a more or less informational character. Your website needs some authority to rank for these keywords.

>50 – 70

Difficult, from this pointy the keywords have a descend amount of search traffic and or have a transactional nature. Making them very interesting to target for a wide range of businesses. This also means competition is up and your website needs topical relevancy and probably backlinks pointing to this specific page to be able to rank.

>70 – 85

Hard, these keywords have a high traffic potential and the competition is fierce. You’ll need to produce high quality content and get page specific backlinks from authorities sites.

>85 – 100

Very hard, these keywords are highly interesting to target for businesses and for this reason are very hard to rank for. You’ll need to have a well-established domain and relevant backlinks from high authorities websites pointing to the specific page to be able to compete. You’ll probably have to do outreach to promote your content and even then it’s hard to predict how well you’ll rank.

Country Support

Currently the Keyword difficulty checker supports 18 different languages. Is your preferred language missing from the list? Please submit a request to include yours, by using the comment form below.

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One thought on “Keyword Difficulty Checker UPDATE

  1. Jasja ter Horst (admin)

    Update:

    • Updated the classification of the Keyword difficulty score ranges. The tool now automatically assigns up to 6 difficulty labels ranging from “Easy” to “”Very hard” making the tool even more actionable.

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