The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty measures the time, effort, and resources required to rank your content on Google using a specific keyword. A difficult keyword will have greater SEO difficulty and require more time and effort to rank. 

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Keyword difficulty affects your resource and strategy planning. You can target keywords for your website and ensure that your content is being put in front of your target audience. Many keyword difficulty checkers are online; some are paid, while others can be used for free. You might want to rank for the keyword “best content writing services,” but you will not be able to rank if you don’t use this keyword in a specific way. 

Keyword difficulty will help you understand if your keyword is realistic to rank. You can plan your content accordingly and allocate your resources effectively. 

How to Calculate Keyword Difficulty?

You can check your keyword’s difficulty online. But before that, you need to take care of some factors as follows: 

1. Domain Authority

New domains need help to rank initially, as it takes time to build authority. It affects SEO keyword difficulty in several ways: 

• Own: It will be difficult to rank if your website is new and has lower authority. 
• Competition: It will be harder to rank for the same keywords you are targeting if a higher domain authority website is ranking for them.

2. Backlinks

Backlinks are still relevant and important even though many ranking factors have evolved with time. Inbound backlinks from authority websites build your domain authority. How does it affect keyword difficulty? If your competitors have strong backlinks, removing them from their spots will take time and effort. 

3. Search Intent

Writing content is not enough to rank because the audience needs to click on your content. Search intent plays a part here. It is of four types: 

• Informational: Educational 
• Commercial: Research before purchase
• Transactional: Used to buy something
• Navigational: Finding a specific page

4. Content Quality

It is impossible to rank without quality content. Your content should be engaging and trustworthy. Do the following to work around SEO keyword difficulty: 

• Keyword Research: Look for what your audience wants to search for and make relevant content. 
• Answer the queries: Write what your audience is looking for in engaging, clear, and comprehensive ways. Use correct and up-to-date information. 
• Optimize: Use clear headings to make your content easy to comprehend and use supporting keywords.

5. Competitors

You must know who you are competing with when trying to rank for a keyword. You have three types of competitors: 

• Industry competitors: Companies selling similar services or products to a similar audience. 
• SEO competitors: Other domains trying to write the same content for a similar keyword. 
• Keyword competitors: People ranking for it currently

What is a Good Score for Keyword Difficulty?

You must know the ins and outs of your website to know a good keyword difficulty score. If you have a domain with higher authority, the chances of your keywords ranking are higher. In such cases, targeting keywords with greater difficulty might be beneficial. On the flip side, if you are working on a new website, it might not be so easy to choose between easier and more difficult keywords to target. It might be wiser to avoid more difficult keywords and select easier ones to build your website’s authority with time. 

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Keyword difficulty can be a major factor in choosing the kind of content you want to put out. If your website has a keyword essential to the foundation of your business and is difficult, it might be worth the effort to target it and rank it even if it takes longer. For instance, if you have a car dealership offering repairs, your website will have a landing page even if the related keywords are more difficult to rank.  

Keywords Based On Difficulty And The Keyword Score

Here are a few tips for you to follow while choosing keywords based on their difficulty. To succeed in ranking your website, you must understand the following: 

• SEO is long-term.

You should not ignore words with greater keyword difficulty if they seem out of reach. Instead, it would be best to understand that it will take more time to rank with them. It would be best to analyze your authority against other websites currently ranking for the keywords you want to target. 

• Balance easy and difficult keywords 

You must want to see results, but achieving them takes time and effort. A prudent approach would be to balance low and higher-difficulty keywords, as it would have the optimum balance required to rank. Target terms with greater keyword difficulty with pillar pages and cluster content with words with lower keyword difficulty. 

While it is not set in stone, we can safely assume a score of 0-29 is an easy keyword difficulty score. If your website has higher authority, even keywords with greater difficulty can rank compared to a website using easier SEO keyword difficulty words with lower domain authority. You must consider the keyword difficulty percentage and use your experience to try and rank. 

Long-tail keywords have lower competition and search volume. They might have higher conversion rates because of less competition. The keyword “content services” might be more challenging to rank than “best content services in India.” Even if you get less traffic, it is likely to be relevant. Relevant traffic includes the audience that wants to interact with your business. Users will get exactly what they want when they search for long-tail keywords. 

In Summary

Basing your keyword difficulty research solely on search volume is a mistake. You will waste a lot of time and effort and probably have a harder time ranking. Use a mix of easy and difficult keywords to rank and try to build your domain authority. Use the SEO difficulty checker online to get insights into your authority and ranking ability. It will help you in your growth path and help you get started. 

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