What does 70% Keyword Difficulty mean in reality?
-
I did a quick search in SEOmoz keyword difficuilty tool and found out most of the keyword I pick with some nice traffic are all 70%. Keyword list: http://screencast.com/t/Y4pPK42ZXrST
How "difficult" is 70%?
If someone ask you to optimize and rank a (very) new website for a keyword with 70% difficulty:
Will you take the challedge or you think mission impossible? Why? How do you relate this reletively abstract "number" to the real world?
Thank you!
-
Wow, that IS good! I like the free copy of Declaration of Independence etc. idea a lot
There is a translation company behind the website and the targeted audiences are people who need professional services to translate their documents / websites accurately.
I like the free translation tool idea as well - to get some browers' traffic - hopefully pick up some buyers from there. It is actually not too difficuilt or expensive to produce. We could use Google Translate API if they did not shut it down, but I believe there are other API available.
Based on your suggestion, we are going to offer webmasters free translation copies of their important web pages right away. Do you have any suggestions where to fish? (for high quality websites) We need to find webmasters who are honest and will keep their words to put up our links on their pages. I mean people could have taken our translation and NOT add our links there - and we can not do anything about it if that happens.
The cost to translate a typial web page is $30~$50. So if we can get a permanent link on a deep subpage of a quality website, it is worth to do it, is that right?. The big assumption is the our link will be put up there and will stay there as long as the page exists.
-
Translation isn't my field of expertise... but if I was going to attack it I would want a free translation tool. However, I know that those are very expensive to produce.
Short of that, if I was ignorantly going to attack it I would got a large number of important documents that are relatively short but of interest to worldwide scholars. These might be documents such as the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence and translate them into various languages. Then I would offer these translated copies as .pdf documents to professors and institutions to place on their website. Each of these would have an attribution link or two in it that points to my website.
If this worked I would continue producing those documents and distributing them for free. You might also offer free or discount translation service to webmasters who would like to have a few important pages of their website in another language. Each of these would have an attribution link.
I would also study the backlinks of some competitors to see where they are coming from. Perhaps they have a strategy that you can employ.
Another method that I have done is to simply buy one of the top ranking websites. It can be a lot more economical than defeating them.
-
For this particular case, it is a typical translation service provider - nothing for people crazy about.
But you check list inpires me on the next project I will pick up. I will pin your list on my office wall, and read it a few times every day
Thank you!
-
Thank you EGOL! As a guru, you may set your goal as #1 postion. For us, top 10 or even top 20 positions could make us happy,** simply because**: about 50% of the top 10 websites listed on Google for those keywords in my question are automatic translation tools. When a visitor looks for professional translation services, he has to scroll down the ranking page to find a real company to do that for him, even go to the second ranking page for that.
Can you offer some advices on that case -- strategies to rank for top 10-20 for 70% difficulty keywords? Now the website (6 months old) is ranked between postion #80 to #120 for those competitive keyword phrases.
-
Great advices!
When you look for some less competitive phrases, do you have a upper limit when you do that? Say 50%, 40% or 30% difficuilty at max to start with a generally new website? (new = a few months old)
-
Could be easy or near to impossible
- How good is your product?
- What is you products USP?
- Is it viral?
- Does it naturally acquire backlinks and social shares as part of its operation?
- Are you going to be able to create amazing stories and content from it to promote it?
- How much creative freedom do you have to promote?
- Are people going to hit your website and go "OMG this is amazing"?
When I see these types of questions, I think the the answer is normally to go back to the product level and engineer a product that wins for you
-
I think that you can only really appreciate a difficulty of 70% if you already have a site that is ranking at TopSERPs for a similar term.
If somebody came to me with a brand new site and wanted a #1 position for a 70% keyword I would know that there will be an awful lot of work going into it and that a #1 position might be impossible to obtain depending upon who is already there and who might launch after we begin.
This is not a KW that you will compete for at the $1000/month level.
-
I look at numbers like that and consider goals. If my long term goal is to compete at that level, and if I think there's going to be a lot of work involved, I'll seed my site and all my SEO methods with a mix of those phrases and others that aren't as competitive. I'll work on all of it over time.
I may start out only seeing results on less competitive phrases, yet as that happens, that alone will help build toward the long term more challenging phrases also gaining ground.
PPC can be a relatively fast way to get visibility for those more difficult phrases, and that can buy me some time on the organic side.
this strategy has worked for countless clients I've used it on.
Also, it's just one metric. Under the current landscape it may appear they have a difficulty of 70. Yet that could be because all competitors in that niche market for that phrase are mediocre. If none stand out, that's a golden opportunity for me to get past the perceived wall.
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
-
Ranking for Competitive Keywords vs. Less Competitive Keyword Variations
I'm curious about situations where a website ranks very well for query variations, but doesn't rank for the query itself (or the reverse of that). For Redfin (where I work), here is the situation with regard to keyword rankings on Google (searched today from USA, incognito)... real estate search - #4 real estate online - #4 real estate site - #5 find real estate - #9 get real estate - #16 real estate - #163 It stands to reason that a site ranking well for a competitive query should also rank well for less competitive query variations - especially query variations that are non-limiting and do not demand a custom landing page (for example, I would consider 'board games' to dramatically limit the query 'games' and be best targeted with a targeted page...not so with 'real estate site' and 'real estate'). So, my question is, what are some theories regarding situations like this? Why do some sites rank so well for competitive queries but not for non-limiting query variations? Why aren't the sites that are crushing us for 'real estate' also crushing us for 'real estate' variations (to be clear...the top sites are crushing us for both)? Is it anchor text? Is it social signals? Is it offline signals, co-occurrence, or citations? What about internal linking and site structure? I realize it's likely a mix of all this, but I'm hoping we can drum up some new ideas here. FYI, on Bing we also rank very well for 'real estate' variations, but leap up to 31st for 'real estate'. Thoughts?
Competitive Research | | RyanOD0 -
What are the pros and cons of putting all content under directory named after target keyword?
The question sounds complicated but is actually quite simple. We want to rank high for the keyword "publicity". Here are some facts: Google Keyword Research: Competition 0.02 & Global monthly searches: 22,200 SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool: highly competitive We are producing plenty of editorial content every day on our online magazine which right now resides under http://mag.publiseek.com and we are thinking of renaming the magazine: "Publicity" and moving it to http://publiseek.com/publicity That way every new article will be under the publicity subdirectory. Of course we would redirect all the existing articles under the old structure to the new one using 301's. And we're hoping that with time we get the top position for the keyword publicity. I am interested to hear from the experts out there what are the pros and cons of this approach?
Competitive Research | | davhad0 -
Where do we find a Keyword Discovery Tool in SEOmoz?
I've been looking for a way to compare keywords amongst my competition websites.
Competitive Research | | homesonthesound0 -
Ranking for long tailed keyword vs shorter keyword phrase?
I have a webpage http://freightmonster.com/free-freight-quote that currently ranks 19th in the Google SERP's for the keyword free freight quote. The keyword gets 59 exact match searches a month. Competition is high for this keyword. The keyword freight quote gets 8625 exact match searches a month and my home page http://freightmonster.com/ ranks 26th in the Google SERP for it. Competition is high for this keyword. Would I be better off creating another page http://freightmonster.com/freight-quote and doing a better job of on SEO optimization for it in the hopes of getting on page one, or given the fact that freight quote is such a highly competitive term should I just go after other long tailed keywords in my market like flatbed trucking freight quote, heavy haul trucking freight quote, RGN freight quote, etc? We have just started on SEO for organic keywords after spending over $500,000 on PPC in the last 5 years, which in our market niche is the norm. Thank you in advance!
Competitive Research | | FreightBoy0 -
Your favorite/most comprehensive guide to keyword research?
what's your favorite guide to keyword research? in lieu of having a favorite, what is the most comprehensive guide you've come across?
Competitive Research | | Mozzin0 -
Can i see the keywords my competitors are optimizing seo for?
Ideally, I would get a list of the keywords my competitors are targeting.
Competitive Research | | sajalsahay0 -
How to compare my pages with a Keyword Difficulty Report
I'm very new to SEO, but know just enough to be dangerous. I've run my first full KWD report and formatted the results per Jordan Judson's blog post. Now I'd like to compare how related pages on my site compare to these results. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to accomplish this task. Any guidance would be very much appreciated. Thanks, Steve
Competitive Research | | SteveMaguire0 -
Does anyone know of a keyword difficulty API?
Hi Mozzers, I've made a script that uses the Google Adwords API to insert big lists of keywords ideas and their monthly search volume into our database. It would be awesome to be able to also automatically get a difficulty score for those keywords from a tool like the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool. Sadly this tool doesn't seem to be in the SEOmoz API. Google does provide a competition score in the AdWords API, but that's only based on the competitiveness of the AdWords auction for that keyword. So my question is: does anyone know another keyword difficulty tool, that does have an API? Thanks! Daan
Competitive Research | | Daan013