Keyword Research: Page Authority and Keyword Difficulty
-
A speaker at a conference suggested using your Page Authority (of home page) number as a benchmark in keyword research to compare against keyword difficulty number.
So if you had a Page Authority score of 60, you would look for keywords with a difficulty of under 60 (using the MOZ metrics for keyword difficulty).
Has anyone used these metrics in this way? Any success?
-
While Page Authority is a primary factor in measuring Keyword Difficulty, the scales are not 1:1 such that you could simply compare PA to KD and know your likelihood of ranking. However, the speaker is certainly heading in the right direction with the thought process.
What I would recommend is finding what keywords the page, or pages like it, on your site already rank in the top 3 for. Create a list in Keyword Explorer of those keywords and then look at the Average Keyword Difficulty which is shown on the Keyword Explorer Lists Dashboard. You can then use that number to determine if a keyword is worth going after because you know that your page is capable of (or not capable of) ranking for terms that difficulty.
I made a video of the process using Google Search Console to find the keywords here...
Good Luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Make Moz reindex the pages for keywords
Hi Moz says we're 18th for a phrase but that's for the page /himonsia-generators because that was the highest ranking page. If you search now for "heavy range generators" we're jumping between 10-12th position but it's for the page /products/generators - which is correct. How can I make Moz "Reindex" the pages?
Moz Pro | | RichardAskew0 -
Why does one page rank while a similar page doesn't?
We have a blog post (actually several of them that have the same SEO characteristics) that brings a fair amount of traffic to our site (relatively speaking), and according to Google Webmaster Tools it averages in the top 10 in SERPs for various terms. This page has no external links to it, and very few internal links pointing to it. When I run Moz's On-Page Grader for the various keywords it ranks for, the page get's an F on all of them. It was not optimized for any keyword, and it isn't our best content; it was a blog post written a few years ago and forgotten about and was never promoted in any way. The topic does happen to be about something that people search for frequently. According to the keyword difficulty tool, all of the keywords it ranks for have 40-45% difficulty. We have lots of other pages on our site that we have tried to optimize and that get A's and B's in On-Page Grader, that have both internal (from the home page and main menu) and external links pointing at them, etc, but they don't rank well at all. Keyword difficulty for these keywords is in the same range, from 37 - 53%. Why does this one page rank so well when the other pages don't? Additionally, we have been looking at a competitor who has a page that ranks #1 in universal results for numerous keywords according to SEMRush, yet the page gets an F On-page Grader for those keywords. The page has 3 links to it, all from the same domain and it has a very low domain and page authority. The Domain Authority of this page is 47 and the page authority is 33 according to Open Site Explorer (compared with our DA of 30, and PA of 1), and the social metrics are a bit higher than ours, but neither has a lot (they may have 15 likes to our 10). Why does this page rank so well for them? How can we get our Page Authority higher? Thanks for any and all help.
Moz Pro | | mukunig1 -
F rated page appearing higher than A rated page
Hi, We have a page that we have optimised in the MOZ system and got a grade A for the term "Dental Implants Wolverhampton" The page that has been optimised isn't being indexed in google http://www.perfectdental.eu.com/treatments-implants.php However, this page http://www.perfectdental.eu.com/uk-clinics-dental-team.php Which hasn't been optimised is indexed 11. If i run this page through the MOZ "on-page checker" it receives a quality score of F. Its very confusing, would be great to hear from anyone with any ideas? Thanks
Moz Pro | | popcreativeltd
Ade0 -
Noob question about keyword research
I have a client that does commercial building renovations. I looked at a lot of their competitors and did some googling to see what words people were using. Some terms such as commercial fit-outs, didn't really have any search volume. I did pick out some that had some volume, Google KW Tool said anywhere from 46 local searches for something like "commercial construction contractors" to 320 for "commercial construction companies". However, no data really shows up for local specifics like "commercial construction companies philadelphia". I tried looking at competitors in the Moz site explorer, but not too many were doing much link building to look at anchor text. Question 1) When it says "local monthly searches", is it defaulting to MY local area based on my google info? So if im in Philly area that local area is whats displaying? Question 2) I tried to run the same keyword list I pulled from Adwords tool through Moz KW tool, and it tells me some of the terms don't have ANY traffic! So know I am real confused as to whether the KW's i picked are good or crap! I attached image of the stuff. CnYyNb3
Moz Pro | | satoridesign0 -
Campaign. Only 1 page is crawled
I have a campaign setup a couple weeks ago and noticed that only 1 page has been crawled. Is there something I need to do to get all pages crawled?
Moz Pro | | priceseo0 -
Open Site Explorer is showing "No Data" for my page titles under the "Top Pages" Tab
This is for my site: www.kibin.com/ Does this mean there is something wrong with how we're titling our pages? We're working on our on-page SEO, titles, meta descriptions this week and getting them up to snuff. I don't understand what is going on here or if it's something to be worried about. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Kibin0 -
Twitter Page Authority Score?
I've been doing some competitive research in Open Site Explorer and many of our competitors have Twitter accounts very similar to ours. Their Twitter pages are usually one of the pages with linking to their website with the most Page Authority. The incoming links from Twitter are a "no follow" as you would guess. This has been the case for a large number of well ranking sites I have looked at. www.dremed.com also has a Twitter account at: https://twitter.com/#!/DREmed . However, Open Site Explorer does not list the Twitter link as an incoming link at all ( or if it does it has no Page Authority ). The Twitter account page seems very similar in nature to other competing Twitter pages. I'm not sure why it does not ALSO pull a high Page Authority score??? Do you know why this might be? Best, Justin
Moz Pro | | justinjeffries0 -
Google rankings dropped for some keywords
http://www.funktiongolf.co.uk uk google Our site ranked well for these words funky golf trendy golf clothes Now these keywords do no rank at all for my website. I have not been penalised by google as i emailed them. The only thing I did was add best seller products to my main page. Now my about us page ranks far higher than my index page Please Help
Moz Pro | | funktiongolf0