Keyword Difficulty

Back when search volume was the only selection criterion, picking the big number was the obvious move. Aim at a term searched fifty thousand times a month, publish, and wait.

Being stuck on page eight six months later was a common outcome. The reason sat in the top of the results. Large publishers and the category leader hold those positions with thousands of inbound links behind them. Meetings kept producing the same question — we picked a high-volume term, why isn't it moving — and the answer had to be explained by opening the top pages one at a time.

Keyword difficulty compresses that explanation into one number. With the strength of the pages up front converted to a score, you can tell before writing whether the fight matches your weight class.

Tools collect the quantity and quality of links held by the top-ranking pages and compress them into a 0-to-100 score. Formulas differ between tools, but the ingredients are three.

1. The number of backlinks the top ten pages have. A backlink is a link another site points at your page, and search engines read it as evidence of trust.
2. How many distinct domains gave those links. A hundred sites each giving one counts for more than one site giving a hundred.
3. Domain authority, the trust estimate for the whole domain. At equal link counts, a page on an old large domain calculates as stronger.

The score is never read as an absolute. Conversion scales differ between tools, so 40 from one tool and 40 from another are not the same difficulty. Read it against your own domain authority instead. A site at authority 18 aimed at a difficulty-60 term will spend a year without reaching the front, while twenty difficulty-15 terms accumulate traffic within six months. This is where the decision to drop to long-tail keywords — longer terms with low volume and clear intent — comes from.

More accurate than the score is opening the search engine results page yourself. Difficulty of 55 with ten community forum threads up front leaves room for one properly written article.

"That term is difficulty 62, which our site can't take on right now."

A judgment that the fight doesn't match the site's weight class.

"I built the six-month plan out of twenty terms under difficulty 20."

Choosing to accumulate terms that can actually be won.

"Difficulty is high but the front page is all forum threads. Worth trying."

Checking the results page instead of trusting the score at face value.

At Pagedeck, Ravi spent six months choosing by search volume before bringing this number in. The term being targeted, collaboration tool, scored 71, and Pagedeck's domain authority was 18. The target became twenty-two terms scoring between 12 and 25, and four months later fourteen of them were on the first page.