Domain authority and keyword difficulty

[Grumpy_Carl]

I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool?

I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment.  When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.

[SEOKeith]

I have a new domain and I am beating pages with much higher page ranks / DA etc

Typically in the niche I am targeting if I use the Keyword Difficulty tool i get an average of about 50% - I think this tool mainly uses DA / PA to work out the difficulty %.

After I will do a Google search and look on the pages for mentions of the keyword's I am going to target with my pages / posts.

Often I find there are few mentions or 1 exact match mention in the content with the page title being something different / not exact match.

I will then build a page which is targeted specifically for the keyword and optimise for it, I don't over do the optimisation - if the other pages only have 2 mentions of the keyword in the content I would normally build a post with say 3 - 5 mentions. I have noticed when going over 5 keyword (aprox) pages tend to rank poorly or rank badly then crawl back up the SERP's slower - this could be due to the domain on the site being 1 month old.

I also only build quality content that is relevant to the search term, this should prevent the pages dropping from the SERP's (I hope!).

Obviously if your niche has highly optimised pages and a bunch of links pointing at each page then this method is not going to work.

Hope that helps.

[activitysuper]

I do this a lot (on a daily bases), so first off your not alone.

And your right in the fact it does need to be weighed up.

It's very hard to give an actual answer but in general if I see PA/DA 40+ a lot of work could be involved, if I see PA/DA 20- should be easy, id expect first page rankings in a few weeks to a month if that.

I don't just go off this alone but it's my starting point, I will check out all of page 1 and page 2 and some times page 3. You might find page 1 is 40+ then page 2 is 25+.

But I do look at lots of elements for example how much there content is shared socially, this gives me an idea if I produced the same sort of content and pushed PPC to it what kind of sharing potential is available from this audience (but this is just a method I do, haven't seen anyone else doing it).