What % is a GO when using the Keyword difficulty tool?
-
Hi,
A lot of keywords I have looked into say 'moderately competitive' at around 35% - 45%.
But what else would you look at in the table to decide whether or not the keyword term is achievable and how do you decide this maybe its the root domain backlinks and maybe you would only touch it if it had less then 30.
Basically what other elements do you look at when deciding whether to pursue?
This might also include some research in Google itself (although most the data you would want is in the tool, well I think anyway!
Cheers
-
You have to do your own testing / look back at your old rankings.
It took me X amount of time to achieve 35% difficulty
It took me X amount of time to achieve 45% difficulty
It took me X amount of time to achieve 55% difficulty
It took me X amount of time to achieve 65% difficulty
Above 75% difficulty you will need to be working with an aged authority domain or be a true ninja.
-
I have two philosophies that are rather contrarian.....
-
Instead of paying attention to the KW difficulty number, go out to the SERPs and look at the content of the top ten websites. If you can beat their content then attack with everything that you got. Great content, given a little visibility, will defeat SEO over time.
-
Do not fear competition, because where there is heavy competition there also usually heavy traffic and where there is heavy traffic there is also lots of money changing hands. Attack heavy competition with high quality content that is long and engaging... and that will attract links and pull traffic on long-tail queries.
-
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
-
Blocking Competitive Analysis Tools in robots.txt.... Worth it?
I've been considering blocking third party crawlers for a while – specifically those crawling my website for the sake of competitive analysis, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. I'm familiar with how to do so, but when researching the question I found practically no one asking the same question. The guides I've found on what to put in your robots.txt make no mention of whether to block competitive analysis crawlers. Which makes me wonder whether this is a good idea after all. My chief concern here is rival sites going after the same search terms we target – one of our competitors in particular has an uncanny way of going after the same searches we are. I know blocking crawlers won't prevent competitors from watching our content, but it will make it slightly harder for them. Is there any major drawback I'm missing? Any big reason not to go ahead and block SEO analysis crawlers?
Competitive Research | | davidwaring0 -
Site Ranking for keywords that they haven't targeted in content
There is a site that I am constantly battling for the #1 spot for a particular keyword and I can't see that they are doing any link building, they are not using any anchor text for the keyword "at all" just their company name (not exact match) and their content doesn't even contain the keyword. I used Open site explorer to analyze their activity, but they are doing something I can't figure out from that data. Any other tools to use? I have higher quality links than them, post content nearly 5 times per week to my blog and their blog hasn't been updated in ages, I kill them in social media, there isn't one instance that they are better than my site and I only build quality driven links, no blog comment crap and get featured on lots of industry blogs for our work. I distribute my content very effectively, I just can't figure it out. They were no where about 5 months ago now they are tearing it up for lots of keywords in the industry top spots. I can build a few links and surpass them, but I have to do it every week or so and I think they are doing something fishy. I just want to figure out what they are doing and bury them. I don't want to post their url and mine here as I don't want them to see this post in search results.
Competitive Research | | photoseo10 -
Does anyone use the Google Custom Search API?
What has your experience been like with the API? Do you prefer a rank tracking tool? If so, which one? API: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
Competitive Research | | CIEEwebTeam0 -
What is the best tool to monitor your competitor's backlinks?
I am looking for a tool that not only accurately tells me how many links are being built by a competitor, I want to know the specific URLs for specific periods. If I can filter/search by time periods, i.e which links were added for the month of August, 2012, that would be great. Thanks for the help.
Competitive Research | | inhouseseo0 -
Good tools to compare site speed on different sites?
Google tells me that my site is slower than 81% of the internet.Now this is a very large news website, so I would like to compare this against other very large news websites. Are there any tools that will be able to tell me the speed of a list of websites? I am looking for something a little more detailed than 'this site loaded in 1 second'. Also, do any of you fellow SEOs know of any good tools to analyse what is causing your site to slow down? Kind regards
Competitive Research | | MirandaP0 -
Correct use of Anchor Text
When is the right time to vary your anchor text? My companies most competitive keyword is "Chicago Movers" and I am just wondering when I should start varying my link building around say for instance Professional Chicago Movers Cheap Chicago Movers Best Chicago Movers When is it alright or not alright to just keep building keywords around just "Chicago Movers"
Competitive Research | | newcitymoving0 -
My competition is using 1px images and links without anchor text. Good or bad idea?
I've been scoping out some of my competition and I noticed the number 1 ranking site is doing a lot of "interesting" stuff. I saw a bunch of 1px blank images that they must be using for the alt tag keywords. I also noticed several links to internal pages with different keywords without anchor text so they don't actually appear on the page. Is this considered black hat? Should I be doing something similar? It feels like the work I'm doing to try to rank #1 with a clean/professional looking site are wasted when the #1 sites are doing things like this.
Competitive Research | | technota0 -
Creating Sub Pages To Target Specific Keywords
Hi Guys, Hope you can answer this question. Our website is currently on the first page in position 6 for a competitive keyword, domain is 11years old and currently has a PR of 4. At the moment there are 4 competitors above us one of which as two listings, they have managed to do this by creating a page dedicated to the keyword. E.g www.ourdomain.co.uk/key-word.html. Do you think we would achieve a good ranking if we built the same page but with fresh content and links pointing to that page? Cheers.
Competitive Research | | ScottBaxterWW0