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
-
Cant find any keyword for my site
I searched for keyword rank for shoreloop.com but couldn't find any. What could be the problem?
Competitive Research | | killerseo20200 -
Long tail keywords / Close variations of keywords / Duplicate Content
In a classified site, people usually search for the same item with different keywords which are often very close to each other and point to same set of results: e.g. honda civic for sale
Competitive Research | | razasaeed
used honda civic for sale
civic for sale
used civic for sale
used civic All the above keywords should actually lead to same results i.e honda civic for sale. Our competitor is creating a page for each one of these www.sitename.com/q/honda-civic-for-sale/
www.sitename.com/q/used-honda-civic-for-sale/
... and so on Basically they create a page for each high traffic keyword they encounter where as we have very structure search. How to compete with that ? They are ranking on all these long tail keywords because of separate landing pages though most of the pages are duplicate of each other. 98% same content (all are showing honda civics) Should we go that route OR optimize our single page focusing on keyword with highest traffic and hope google will rank us for the related keywords as well ?0 -
Anyone want to test out my keyword research theory?
Hi all, I'm relatively new here but not new to the world of SEO / SEM. Over the years I've loved using SEOmoz and other tools but of course have found certain limitations with respect to how I like to work. That's the case with any tool / service. So over the years I've put together a keyword research / competitor analysis process that has worked well for me and I'm wondering if it might also work for others. I've spent the last 15 years of my life as a director of a range of companies, mainly in printing but also in systems development, marketing, etc. I spent a large percentage of my time developing systems and tools to help me with my search engine marketing. I've now sold all my companies and I'm semi-retired, somewhat bored, and would love it if I can assist others with the process I've used over the years. I'm curious to know whether SEM professionals agree with the way my system ranks search terms from "best" to "worst". If you're interested in testing this process and telling me if you think the resulting list of search terms that I come up with for your website is "spot on", "not bad" or "horrible!", then please read on. My key motivation here is to educate myself as well as others. I'm not charging for any of this... If you give me your website URL, your top 5 competitors and your top 5 search terms, I will return to you: a complete list of search terms including "niche" and longtail search terms you can then... really easily filter out irrelevant search terms, thus creating a list of negative keywords, ready to import into your Adwords campaign. easily group your search terms in "education" and "purchase" search terms so I can analyse these two groups of keywords separately see which words are used most often across all the search terms so you can easily create keyword specific Ad Groups in your Adwords campaign. You can tell me which options you prefer: broad match, "phrase match" or [exact match] when getting search engine results specify any country you want the SERP results for, or even any city. I will then: do all the keyword research, getting the latest (live) Google SERP results combine all competitor metrics (page rank, domain age, juice links, etc) and search term information (search volume, CPC, search term length, etc) together to give you a list of search terms ranked from "best" to "worst" do the same for both organic search terms and paid (Adwords) search terms do the same for both direct search terms and niche search terms take into account "word count" (number of words in a search term) as longtail keywords generally higher-converting search terms And you can adjust things to change how the keywords are ranked: specify "thresholds". eg; you can ignore the really competitive search terms, or ignore the really short search terms specify "weightings". eg; you can put a greater emphasis on search term length, or a lesser emphasis on cost per click As a result of the keyword analysis, it'll also show you who your organic and adwords competitors are based on all keywords, or just your top ranked ("best") keywords. In that competitor data you can see: which paid ads appear at the top, side AND bottom of the results page which organic results are shopping, image, video, and local results all the metrics for each competitor (page rank, domain age, juice links, etc) All of this is is handled in a simple web interface that I threw together recently. It's really simple, merely asking for your site and preferences and then an interface to view / sort the results. Interested?
Competitive Research | | eatyourveggies
I'd like to hear from any SEM professionals who want to test this process. Once I have your basic details, I can get a keyword list together simply (using my internal process / software) and then you need to do some basic sorting, particularly if your search terms are in an industry that I know nothing about. Your input will be required. From there, give me 24-48 hours and I'll return 2 lists of search terms: "organic", and "Adwords". I'd love to hear your opinion about the relevance of the search term lists. I hope it will also spark some interesting discussion and hopefully help people learn a bit more about keyword / competitor research. If you're interested, please shoot me a private message letting me know why you'd be a good candidate to test this system. I really do want people who are well versed in search engine marketing. So please include a basic "resume" about who you are. If you have an SEM company and that's your main career focus then I definitely want to hear from you. Adam0 -
What keywords & phrases are my competitors targeting?
I wanted to compare our keyword focus, to my competitors. What is the best way to audit what type of content / keywords - my competitors are using?
Competitive Research | | jwochna0 -
Question about Keywords & Ranking
I hope this isn't too basic of a question, but I am confused about something. If you use the Keyword Research tool and type in "Stained Concrete Flooring", the 3rd result (stainedconcrete.org) has the lowest numbers of any of the sites in the top 8-10... Is it because they have a large amount of traffic? or is there some other factor that I am missing?
Competitive Research | | Timvroom0 -
Better tactics for keyword research
I am paying for monthly Adwords Google. I am planning to build out and optimize my website content with the findings from the Adwords campaign. What is frustrating me is the Google list of keywords recommended. Is there a better tool for determining excellent, "long-tail" keywords specific to my industry, products and services? -Feeling Left Out
Competitive Research | | natearistotle0 -
Different SERP results in browsers / different result pages for keyword in browser
Hi, I am making the SEO reports for a travel agency and I have the following problem. SEOmoz shows me the website is on page 1, for a keyword. Yesterday, a google search with firefox showed me the same position, while, searching from a different computer on google using firefox gave me another position. The URL shown was also different. I asked some friends to do the search - the results were the same - first page. Today, firefox shows me the second URL on the 4'th page, and the result from the first page of google does not appear, while Chrome still shows me the first URL on the first page. I have no idea why the URL that was ranking well does not appear on the first page with Firefox, and why it appears on the first page with Chrome, or why the URL that was ranking bad -meaning page 4, appears on Firefox but does not appear on Chrome. Can someone give me some advice?
Competitive Research | | Netlogiq0 -
Best methodology for creating local keywords when Google has no data?
Generally I'll look at data for specific geographical searches and incorporate the data from the other keywords, then track the metrics. I think there is likely a more efficient system but I'm not sure where to start.
Competitive Research | | DoriC0