Keyword Difficulty: How to Measure It?

Content creators and bloggers aim to push their websites’ rankings. Different key metrics can help you to prioritize keywords as per their competition.

If you had worked with any SEO executive, then you might listen to them saying words such as – competition or competitiveness. If yes, then let me tell you – SEO executives consistently worry about how difficult it will be for them to rank a specific keyword.

Keyword difficulty is a key metric that helps in deciding about specific measures that you need to input to rank your content. There are three levels of keyword difficulty such as: low, medium, and high.

For example, it means that if a specific keyword has a high difficulty level then you (as an SEO executive) will need to put your additional effort. Now, you may be thinking that you should ignore “high-keyword difficulty” to reduce the additional effort. The answer is a big “NO”.

Here, you need to understand that selection of the keywords depends upon the identified targeted audiences. Once you identified your targeted audiences, then you need to make sure to include specific keywords as per their difficulty level with a search volume. In this way, you will be able to reduce the average bounce rate and increase the dwell time of the users.

Let’s Understand Different Metrics to Measure Keywords Difficulty

Semrush Keywords Tool

Figure 1

In Semrush, there is a metric called “KD %”. For example: suppose, you searched for the keyword name “automation”. If you get a high KD% (85+) then it indicates that there is high competition for this particular keyword. If you get a low KD% (below 35 or 30) then it indicates a low or medium level of competition.

Google Keyword Planner

Figure 2:

In the Google Keyword Planner, they follow a specific competition-based breakdown such as:

Till now, you must have gained an insight related to the keywords competitions on the popular keywords planner.

Now, let’s understand the specific metrics which are used to analyze the percentage or scores of specific keywords:

Factor #1: Search Volume

Figure 3

The search volume of specific keywords helps in deciding an average competition-based score. Here, you need to understand that the search volume keeps changing over time.

Now, a question may arise in your mind if the search volume changes over time then how you will compute the volume of a specific keyword? My suggestion to you is – always focus on calculating the 12-month average search volume-based formula.

Important note: instead of depending upon Google’s average provided for the last 12 months, you should aim for calculating manual data.

Factor #2: Potential Traffic Growth

A website’s organic growth is based on its history as well as current data.

Figure 4:

Factor #3: KOB Metric

It stands for the “keyword opposition benefit”. If you will utilize the KOB metric, it will provide you with an idea about the three different criteria such as competition, cost, and volume.

[Below paragraph is for those readers only who are not aware of the KOB – Keyword Opposition Benefit]

KOB is the act of analyzing information or content from other websites and then prioritizing specific keywords which should be present in your content. It will help in ranking the website faster.

Factor #4: Match Type Ratio

While discussing the keyword difficult metric, we cannot neglect to discuss the intent of a keyword. The use of this factor will help in deciding whether a keyword is uniform or fractured.

Now, suppose that you need to write an article on “automation”. You simply searched on Semrush and you select those keywords which incorporate low KD%. Tell me, what do you think your article will rank on the first 5 SERP links? The answer is probably “No”.

In this case, you need to take use of the match type ratio. It (match type ratio) will tell you how much your current keywords are required to match with the search query generated by the users.

The Final Words

Let’s recall your school days, if any student comes in the top 10 students and he/she wants to come at the first position then what does he/she need to do?

-To outrank other students who are present in the top 10 class ranking. Right?

Similarly, in SEO also it is important to outrank competitors. Now, if you are new to SEO then you must be wondering about what can be effective ways to outrank the competitors. As per my experience, you should focus on the below areas to outrank your competitors:

• Quality of the content: content should be able to address the problem of the users or readers. Your content should not develop a feeling of boredom among the users. In short, your content should be capable to increase user engagement with the article or information.
• Use of backlinks: did you ever heard about “vote of confidence”? Backlinks are the vote of confidence for a specific website. As backlines are the signals that the provided information is backed by a creditable source.
• On-page optimization: page optimization works on tweaking your page’s content, tags and internal links.

FAQs

Question 1: Which types of backlines should be provided in the SEO?

• You can give backlinks to any guest blogging post.
• You can give backlines of webinars.
• You can also provide backlines in business profiles.
• Badge-based backlinks.

Question 2: Average percentage of a keyword difficulty?

If your keyword search planner, showcases the keyword difficulty score as more than 30% then it can be marked as a moderately difficult keyword.

Question 3: What important things to remember while providing the backlinks?

Make sure to add only creditable websites in the backlinks. Whenever you provide any data or any fact then always provide an anchor text through backlinks. Adding backlinks with the numbers will help in showcasing the creditability of the information.