Most of the times, if you haven’t been able to find success from the keywords that you’ve been targeting due to a really high competition then it becomes very frustrating. You end up getting into a situation where you start losing your clients and they go on to take their business somewhere else.
The best thing you can do in such a scenario is to make sure that you invest your efforts in areas where there’s going to be a lower level of competition. What if I told you that there was a tool which would let you know about the level of competition facing any particular keyword? Such a tool exists and is called the keyword difficulty checker.
Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty metric
Google says that links and content relevance are the top ranking metrics for your site’s placement in search results. The results of our own study of two million keywords confirm this statement. We see a strong correlation between the number of referring domains a web page has and its position in Google search results.
That is why, to calculate Keyword Difficulty, we analyze the search results for a keyword and look at the number of referring domains the top 10 ranking pages have. In simple terms, the more referring domains across the top ranking pages, the higher the Keyword Difficulty.
Our metric is widely considered the most accurate one. Keyword Difficulty doesn’t take into account any on-page factors.
Keyword Difficulty evaluates the chances of getting into top 10 of search results (not top 3 or top 1). Apart from backlink profiles and content relevancy, many additional ranking factors come into play among the results of the first page of any search.
Keyword Difficulty scale
We measure Keyword Difficulty on a scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the hardest.
The scale is not linear. Each value on it corresponds to the estimated number of referring domains (RDs) a page needs in order to get to the first page of search results.
Here’s the relation between the Keyword Difficulty and the number of RDs needed:
| Keyword difficulty | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 80 | 90 | ||
| Referring domains | 0 | 10 | 22 | 36 | 56 | 84 | 129 | 202 | 353 | 756 |
If you’re aiming for a keyword with KD 40, you’re likely to need approximately 56 RDs to get into the top 10 search results.
Find easy-to-rank keywords from millions of ideas
Ahrefs’ keyword database has 11.7 billion keywords in 229 countries. It is already the biggest database on the web, and it’s growing steadily.
Whether you are analyzing your own list of keywords or looking at the suggestions in Keywords Explorer, our Keyword Difficulty metric shows you the opportunities you can easily rank for.
Combined with Search Volume, this metric will help you find keywords that can bring you very good organic traffic but don’t require much effort to rank for.
However, despite its value, Keyword Difficulty should not be the only factor affecting your keyword choice. We recommend that you use it as the first filter to sort through the massive number of possible keywords.
The further choice of keywords must be based on a complete and detailed SERP analysis. No SEO tool can do this work for you, because every case is unique. But you will find all the necessary data for analysis in the SERP overview Ahrefs provides.
Moz Keyword Difficulty Metric
Moz Keyword Difficulty
Level of trust: High
Moz’s proprietary Keyword Difficulty score shows how easy (or hard) it is to rank on each SERP. Difficulty score takes into account the Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) scores of results ranking on the first page of Google for a given query. It intelligently modifies for the projected click-through-rate (CTR) of a given page, putting more weight on high-ranking, more visible pages.
Keyword Explorer lets you combine Difficulty score, search volume, and estimated CTR to find your biggest keyword opportunities.
MOZ’s keyword explorer is based on the page authority (PA) and domain authority (DA) of Google’s top 10 results. The metric also takes several other factors into account, like the number of internal pages vs. the number of home pages in SERP, as well as the use of query terms in the results. MOZ does not, however, reveal all factors.
In this article, Rank Fishkin explains the score and provides a sample scale:
MOZ’s PA and DA are still two of the most reliable SEO metrics and are based on a constantly-updated algorithm that’s based on more than 40 factors. You can read more about both of MOZ’s authority metrics here and decide for yourself, but many free keyword difficulty checkers and several other tools rely on Moz’s data.
The bad news? MOZ’s metrics are automatically calculated and the exact algorithms are not publicly available. That said, the formulas are updated regularly and utilize a wide variety of factors. When using the score, remember that the actual scale of the tool runs between 20 and 70 (not 0 to 100).
If you still have second thoughts, take a look at this research about the most accurate keyword difficulty tools.
Ubersuggest Keyword Difficulty
Level of trust: Medium
The tool Ubersuggest has been recently revamped, but there isn’t a lot of publicly available information about their keyword difficulty score yet. The summary for the score is pretty short:
There are tons of questions surrounding Neil Patel’s release of a new version of the tool:
While Patel still hasn’t written the blog post article on the topic (as promised in the comments), his support team responded quickly. This was a positive surprise, as we didn’t have incredibly high expectations.
“Ubersuggest’s keyword difficulty is a proprietary metric that we developed specifically for Ubersuggest. [It uses] a complex algorithm to determine how hard it is for you to rank among the first 20 search results for a given keyword (in the context of a specific country) based on several different criteria on a scale from 0 to 100.”
To calculate this metric, Ubersuggest takes the following into account:
- The Domain Score of each of the first 20 pages ranking for that keyword
- How many backlinks these pages get
- How in-depth and rich their content is
Sounds good, right? They use many ranking factors, similarly to MOZ. To determine a domain score, Ubersuggest incorporates the following information:
There are three downsides, however. First, this feature is relatively new, and we expect that the algorithm needs time, data, and fine-tuning for higher accuracy. The domain authority metric (another new feature) isn’t available for certain websites.
Second, the score is based on the first 20 results (similar to SEMRush) making it more useful for brand new websites.
Finally, the scale is still unclear. The tool shows low, medium, and high difficulty, but that’s not as convincing as other tools’ scales. We maintain that when enough data exists for the scale, Neil Patel will write the blog post he promised in the comments.
We plan to keep track of the metric as it’s definitely promising and has the potential to go from a medium to a high level of trust. The tool is cheaper than the ones analyzed above, which makes it the go-to option for small businesses or bloggers who simply don’t have the budget for MOZ or more expensive tools. Keep in mind, however, that keywords with low difficulty scores may not be so easy to rank for.
SE Ranking Keyword Difficulty
Level of trust: Medium
The SE Ranking tool provides a keyword difficulty score from 1 to 100, which is based on off-page and on-page SEO factors. The description provided within the tool says that they use a combination of page quality and backlink profiles for the top 10 ranking results. The backlink factors include the number of outbound links and spam score for the ranking page.
The scale used by the tool ranges from Easy to Super Hard:
- 0 to 10 is Easy
- 11 to 40 is Medium
- 41 to 70 is Hard
- 71 to 100 is Super Hard
So far, we don’t know other details about the score, especially what on-page factors are included. However, SE Ranking’s keyword difficulty score has two main advantages – they analyze the top 10 results (the ones that actually get clicks from users), and they take full advantage of the 0 – 100 scale. Their score range can help you see more nuances when analyzing scores compared to other tools that show results scaled between a smaller range.
The downside I encountered was that the tool doesn’t show data for some long-tail queries. Similarly to Ubersuggest, I expect their database to get expanded in the future. Since SE Ranking offers an inexpensive subscription plan, this tool can also be a great option for inhouse teams, bloggers, or specialists that are starting out.
SEMRush Keyword Difficulty
Level of trust: Medium
SEMRush shows keyword difficulty index, and their metric is calculated in percentages from 0 to 100%. However, the official scale provided by SEMRush divides the scores into three groups, with the actual scale falling between 60 and 80 percent. Here is a link to their article about their score.
I tried to get some additional information about the metric from SEMRush support. Here’s their response:
I highlighted the two most important things to consider: Analyzing the top 20 SERP results and using their own SEMRush Rank.
In case you don’t remember details for SEMRush rank, it’s calculated based on the estimated traffic that goes to a domain from all organic positions.
SEMRush shows whether SERP results are dominated by high authority domains with well-established organic rankings for multiple keywords. This helps to explain why – according to SEMRush – “vegetarian pasta” is a keyword with medium difficulty.
The metric is useful if you plan to launch a brand new website and need to look for niches that aren’t dominated by major high-authority players. The first step is getting a URL in the top 20 results which isn’t so valuable if you have a well-established domain that’s ready to attack the first page.
Conclusion
Keyword difficulty is an important metric that must be considered when creating a link building campaign. It takes into account many different factors, including the amount of competition you have to fight to rank for a keyword.