Keyword Difficulty Score Assesment

[13375auc3]

What is a good keyword difficulty score to pursue when deciding which keywords to try and rank on?

I'm in a very competitive field and I am currently in the process of doing keyword research to look for the low hanging fruit.

[gonzalo.rt]

Hi,

Moz says that keyword difficulty score is based in domain authority and page authority of the competing 20 search results for a keyword. I wonder if it only takes those 2 values because, in that case, that score would not be representative enough for the difficulty. Does not it take the onpage optimization -keyword in title, text, etc-?

How do you determine the keyword difficulty?

Your Keyword Difficulty Score is based on the Domain Authority and Page authority for the top 20 search results that keyword is pulling on Google. These sites are analyzed using our Mozscape index to pull Page Authority and Domain Authority. These two metrics (along with a host of others from the Mozscape index) help create the Keyword Difficulty score.

[94501]

I'd reverse engineer a little and see what keyword difficulties you've managed to rank on so far and why. Of course, the numeric score is just a guideline and take it with a grain of salt. Start with with what you've managed to rank on so far and then look for similar or somewhat more difficult terms going forward.

[SCL-SEO]

Old question now, but interesting none the less and currently marked as unanswered. As tomcraig86 says there is much more to it than relying on the KD score, but I tend to go by the rough guide of :

• Sub 30 - pretty easy.
• 30 - 35 fairly easy with good on page and some quality anchored links.
• 35 - 40 - starting to take a bit more effort, air tight on-site SEO required as well as good link profile.
• 40 - 50 domain authority counts much more, without it will take longer to rank although I have done this with minimal off-site efforts before.
• 50+ All about resources. Onsite SEO needs to be totally nailed, including internal linking/ topic modelling etc. a strong & diverse link profile with good social signals and ... time.

This is just from my experience of ranking for keywords in conjunction with output from this awesome tool. Been doing SEO for some time, but only using the keyword difficulty tool for about 12 months.

[tomcraig86]

You'll need to assess which keywords are actually a possibility for your site. Ranking isn't down to just the keyword you're going for. Domain age, authority, trust etc are all factors used in calculating your position in the SERPs. Don't get scared off by a 'Highly Competitive' keyword though!!

[tomcraig86]

Well if you want a keyword you have to just go for it! If your site has loads of unique content, the likelyhood is that you'll start seeing benefits from long tail searches coming in with not too much work.

Check out the PRO campaigns on here, I'm assuming you're aware that SEOmoz utilizes some Google API's to serve up their own keyword difficulty score. Unfortunately the site I'm link building to is in a super competitive market!

Hope this helps.

Tom

[13375auc3]

That is the tool I am asking about, whats a good percentage score to go after when researching a keyword?

[wissamdandan]

SEOMoz Have its own Keyword Difficulty tool and it have a very good and powerful analysis for the top 10 rankings.

http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty