The Importance of a Keyword Difficulty Checker for Ranking

Keyword difficulty is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing keywords for your website or content strategy.

It gives you an idea of how difficult it will be to rank well for certain keywords based on the number of other websites already ranking well.

This article will explore in more detail why keyword difficulty is so important and outline what you should look for when deciding on a good difficulty keyword score.

What Is Keyword Difficulty in SEO?

When used in SEO, a keyword difficulty check is how difficult it is to rank on page one in Google.

It’s important to use this because if you’re trying to generate traffic with SEO, you want as much as possible to be targeted traffic.

You don’t want to do everything right from an SEO perspective: the page architecture, the backlinks, the URL, create great, etc., etc., and fail to rank on the first page of SERPs.

Is There a Good Keyword Difficulty to Target?

There isn’t an exact number, but there is a formula.

Knowing your competition, the search engines, and the goal will help you determine the difficulty level to work on.

This means that you first must know your site to know what a good keyword difficulty score is.

So, if you’re running a high-authority domain, you may have the potential to win more difficult keywords more easily.

In that case, targeting high-difficulty search terms might even be worthwhile.

Contrarily, deciding whether to target the most difficult search terms might not be clear-cut if you’re running a brand-new site.

In most cases, it might be a wiser strategy to avoid the most difficult keywords and target easier ones while you build up your authority over time.

However, if you decide that the most challenging keywords are foundational to your business, targeting them is worth the extra effort, even if it may take longer to rank.

Why Is Keyword Difficulty Important for SEO?

One important function of keyword difficulty checkers is to analyze what your competition is doing with their SEO.

Some sites use ‘difficult’ keywords and phrases that will be hard to rank against if you don’t invest in good SEO.

They may also reveal up-and-coming topics in an industry or possible new entries into niche markets.

So, in a sense, it’s a super important part of the keyword research and SEO process.

Why?

Well, obviously, it helps you choose the best keywords for SEO.

Additionally, they can help you determine what your potential organic traffic could be over time.

In other words, keyword difficulty can help you determine how realistic your SEO goals are to rank a new page.

You can use that knowledge to build your content plan and allocate the appropriate resources to support it.

How Hard Will It Be for You to Rank for a Particular Keyword?

1. Content Quality Impacts Keyword Difficulty

First and foremost, keyword difficulty is what search engines use to gauge the quality of a site.

If you have high levels of difficult keywords on your site, then you should also have good content and domain authority.

So, answer these questions:

• How hard will it be to write content of equal or better quality than the competing pages?
• Compared to the competitors, is there any benefit you can provide readers? (visuals, knowledge, unique data, unique perspective, etc.)
• Can you provide the same level of expertise as my competitors?

These are subjective factors that contribute to the overall keyword difficulty in your specific case.

2. Competitors Impacts Keyword Difficulty

Looking at competing websites is one of the best ways to estimate the difficulty of ranking for a keyword.

Focus on the quality of their content and on-page SEO.

If your main competitors for a keyword are well-established and have high authority domains, it will be even harder to unseat them from the top spots.

The truth is that if you have a new domain, you will struggle to rank for competitive keywords.

After all, it takes time to build up the authority you need to conquer the SERPs — especially when your competitors are already established as authority in that industry.

One other key factor is the authority of your own website.

So, even if the competition for a keyword is relatively low and you write the most out-of-this-world piece of content, you probably won’t rank with your brand new site, which has zero backlinks.

3. Backlinks

While Google’s ranking factors have evolved over time, the presence and quality of backlinks are still essential considerations for SEO.

Quality backlinks are inbound links that come from authoritative sources.

And it’s these links that tell search engines that your content is likely to be trustworthy.

This ultimately helps to build your domain’s authority.

If you want new content to rank, you need to map out a link-building strategy to grow its authority over time.

And if in the near future you will have content that ranks, building and maintaining a solid backlink profile will help you stay on top.

Conclusion

Keyword difficulty is an important factor when it comes to ranking.

It measures how difficult it is to rank for the given keyword on Google.

Knowing how difficult your keywords are will allow you to know how much time you should spend optimizing each one and which ones to prioritize in order to give yourself more chances at ranking well on SERPs.

So, take the time to understand how doable it is to rank for the keywords you want and find opportunities such as lower difficulty and higher-value keywords to get on the search engine page results.