What Is Keyword Difficulty in the AI Era (New Difficulty)

Keyword difficulty is a metric that indicates how hard it would be to rank on a search engine like Google for a certain keyword. It’s just something that is calculated based on the quality and number of competing pages, domain authority, and backlink profiles, among other factors.

Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush give keyword difficulty a score. This score usually runs between 0 and 100, with higher values reflecting more difficult competition. Getting a grasp on keyword difficulty is essential for effectively prioritizing your SEO efforts by targeting terms with high search potential and attainable ranking potential.

Low-difficulty keywords are ideal for newer sites just starting to gain authority and credibility. This means that more established sites can afford to compete on some of those higher-difficulty keywords. By measuring this metric, you’ll be able to develop a more strategic and successful content plan that aligns with your objectives.

Key Takeaways

• Keyword difficulty is one of the most important metrics, which measures how difficult it would be to rank for certain keywords. Once you understand it, you’ll be able to decide more intelligently how to proceed with your SEO tactics.
• Keyword difficulty scores range from 0-100. Lower scores indicate easier opportunities to improve your rankings, whereas higher scores require more resources and a strategic approach.
• Understanding keyword difficulty helps you prioritize keywords that align with your goals and available resources. That clarity allows you to confidently and effectively prioritize content to target based on your website’s current authority.
• Search volume, backlinks, domain authority, and SERP features all factor into the essential keyword difficulty equation. Understanding these factors is vital to doing smart keyword research.
• As you can see, it’s critical to consider keyword difficulty scores in the context of your unique niche and business goals. Combine the score with additional metrics such as user intent, search volume, etc., for a comprehensive SEO strategy.
• Finding a balance of both high and low-difficulty keywords within your strategy will set you up for quicker wins. Additionally, it fosters long-term benefits, assisting you in resource planning and achieving the best SEO results.

What is Keyword Difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is an SEO metric, represented as a numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100, that estimates how challenging it is to rank for a particular keyword on search engines like Google, with a higher score indicating greater difficulty in appearing on the first page of search results.

SEO Tools

Keyword research tools create difficulty scores to estimate how difficult it is to get a high ranking for a given keyword. These scores further allow you to gauge the competitive landscape.

Tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush determine that score based on considerations such as your competitors’ backlinks, topical authority, and rankings of existing pages. Specifically, a keyword that has strong authority content winning the top spots will most likely have a higher difficulty score.

By grasping this score, you can select keywords that match your SEO potential, making sure your work contributes towards goals you’ve got a realistic chance of achieving. Remember, each tool uses its own formula, so there will be some minor variations between scores.

Importance in Keyword Research

Keyword difficulty is crucial in keyword research because it directly indicates the competitiveness of ranking for a specific term.

Understanding difficulty allows you to prioritize keywords that are realistically attainable, preventing wasted effort on overly competitive targets. By focusing on keywords with lower difficulty, you can more effectively drive organic traffic and improve your search engine rankings, especially when resources are limited.

What a Keyword Difficulty Score Indicates

A high keyword difficulty keyword means there’s a lot of strong content to compete within the SERPs. This is represented by high scores, usually with search volumes greater than 100k indicating heavy investment in SEO assets would be required.

The lower the score, the more attainable the opportunity to rank. This score combines critical elements such as backlinks, visibility, and trends to give you relevant insights to help you plan your strategy more strategically.

Understanding Keyword Difficulty Metrics

Keyword difficulty is one of the most important metrics to consider when deciding which keywords to target with your SEO efforts. Typically expressed as a number between 1 and 100, it measures how difficult it is to rank for any given keyword. Each score takes into account an average of 15 different factors like page authority (PA) and domain authority (DA).

The higher the score, the more competitive the keyword is. Having a clear understanding of these metrics is absolutely imperative for creating the most effective content strategies and winning the SEO game.

1. Factors Influencing Keyword Difficulty Score

1. Search volume Search volume indicates how often people are searching for that keyword. The backlinks number shows how powerful competing pages are. Average keyword difficulty signals the authority of leading domains.

Along with SERP features such as featured snippets or local packs, which all add to the competitiveness of rankings. Key factors include:

• High search volume often correlates with higher difficulty.
• Number of Backlinks: More backlinks typically mean stronger competition.
• Average Domain Authority: Sites with higher DA dominate rankings.
• SERP Features: Enhanced results add complexity to competition.

2. Interpret Keyword Difficulty Scores Accurately

Your keyword scores need to reflect the authority and niche of your website. It’s fairly easy for most sites to be in the 20s or 30s score-wise. Many startups should be shooting for scores way under 65.

Don’t just let the score dictate everything. Look at search intent, content quality, and your audience’s needs.

3. High vs. Low Keyword Difficulty Explained

4. What Constitutes a “Good” Keyword Difficulty?

The answer to this question starts with: It depends. By balancing keyword difficulty with potential demand, you set yourself up to succeed with stronger results.

Tools for Assessing Keyword Difficulty

Grasping the concept of keyword difficulty means using the tools available to them that measure levels of competition, providing a clear outlook on ranking possibilities. Like many tools, each one usually has its own proprietary algorithm and/or database they use, so this is where things can get wildly different.

Understanding their differences, metrics, and how they calculate things allows you to make the best possible data-driven decisions.

Analyze Tool Variations

Semrush, KWFinder, and Ahrefs are all great keyword research tools. Each one uses its own proprietary backlink database and algorithm to determine keyword difficulty (KD).

Semrush goes further by providing a generic KD score as well as a Personal Keyword Difficulty score – the personal touch gives you more relevant insights. These tools often give you a score between 0 and 100, with higher scores indicating more difficult keywords.

For example, a KD score of 100% represents the highest level of competition, and 0% means no difficulty at all. KWFinder makes it easy to navigate by color-coding these scores so you can quickly tell apart more competitive terms from low-difficulty terms.

Compare Metrics Across Platforms

Metrics differ from platform to platform, so the most important thing is to be consistent when comparing scores. Semrush takes into account backlink-related metrics – such as Link Power and Organic Traffic – in its formula.

Some tools place too much emphasis on backlink profiles, only showing you how hard a keyword could potentially be – or won’t – due to site authority. For example, a 71% KD score in one tool might mean that a keyword receives 823,000 searches per month.

The next tool may assign it a much lower score due to differences in their database. Comparing within the same tool ensures accurate analysis without skewed interpretations.

Discuss Calculation Methods

Even calculation methods that heavily focus on backlinks still treat backlinks as a foundational ranking factor. Some tools reduce competition to one simplified number, but many take a wider view, including metrics such as organic visibility or overall domain power.

These differences further emphasize how KD scores should not be taken as singular benchmarks, but rather as relative markers.

The AI Era and the Evolution of Keyword Difficulty

The landscape of SEO, and consequently keyword difficulty, is undergoing a profound transformation driven by advancements in artificial intelligence. AI’s influence is reshaping how search engines understand and rank content, forcing us to reconsider traditional KD metrics.

1. AI’s Impact on Search Intent Understanding

• Nuanced Interpretation: AI, particularly through technologies like BERT and MUM, allows search engines to decipher the subtleties of search intent with unprecedented accuracy. This means that keywords are no longer evaluated in isolation. Search engines now focus on the context and user journey behind each query.
• Long-Tail and Semantic Search: AI enhances the importance of long-tail keywords and semantic search. While traditional KD might focus on head terms, AI’s ability to understand related concepts and phrases means that ranking for a cluster of interconnected topics becomes more critical. This shifts the focus from individual keyword difficulty to topic cluster difficulty.
• User Experience Prioritization: AI prioritizes content that provides a positive user experience. This includes factors like page speed, mobile-friendliness, and content relevance. Therefore, even with a low KD score, poor user experience can hinder ranking.

2. Content Quality and E-E-A-T

• Emphasis on Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T): AI algorithms are increasingly sophisticated at evaluating content quality based on E-E-A-T signals. This means that even with a low KD score, content lacking genuine expertise or authority will struggle to rank.
• AI-Generated Content Challenges: The rise of AI-generated content poses new challenges for KD. While AI can produce large volumes of content, search engines are becoming better at detecting and penalizing low-quality, AI-spun articles. Therefore, focusing on high-quality, human-centric content remains crucial, regardless of KD.
• Topic Authority over Individual Keywords: AI favors websites with deep topical authority. This means that focusing on building comprehensive content around a specific subject area is more effective than targeting individual, isolated keywords. This changes how we evaluate difficulty, as it becomes more about the difficulty of establishing topical authority.

3. SERP Feature Evolution

• AI-Powered SERP Features: AI is driving the evolution of SERP features, such as featured snippets, knowledge panels, and “people also ask” boxes. These features can significantly impact organic click-through rates, even for high-ranking pages.
• Voice Search Optimization: AI is powering the growth of voice search, which often involves natural language queries that differ from traditional keyword searches. Optimizing for conversational queries and long-tail phrases becomes more important than focusing solely on short-tail keywords. This changes the focus of keyword difficulty, to the difficulty of answering complex questions.
• Personalized Search Results: AI-driven personalization means that search results can vary based on individual user preferences and search history. This makes it more difficult to accurately assess keyword difficulty, as results may differ for different users.

4. The Future of Keyword Difficulty

• Holistic Evaluation: Moving forward, keyword difficulty will need to be evaluated more holistically, considering factors beyond traditional metrics like backlinks and domain authority.
• AI-Driven Keyword Research: AI-powered tools will likely play a greater role in keyword research, providing more accurate and nuanced insights into search intent and competition.
• Adaptability and Continuous Learning: In the AI era, SEO professionals must be adaptable and continuously learn to keep pace with the evolving search landscape.

By understanding how AI is reshaping search, we can develop more effective SEO strategies that go beyond tradition

How to Choose Keywords by Difficulty

When choosing keywords, knowing a keyword’s difficulty is key to making sure you target keywords compatible with your resources and goals. Keyword difficulty indicates how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword. It takes into account competition and multiple search engine factors.

By examining this metric deeply, you’ll be able to prioritize the most achievable opportunities, all while dominating your website’s SERP presence.

Align Difficulty with Resources

Your resources—time, money, and current website authority—are a big factor in deciding which keywords you can realistically go after. Tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush will give you a “KD%” score from 0 to 100 that gives a general sense of ranking difficulty.

The “PKD%” score takes into account your own website metrics, like domain authority and the number of backlinks. If you’re working on newer or lower-authority sites, target keywords with low PKD% values.

These are the keywords that you have a better chance of ranking for, given your current abilities. Picture this—a keyword that does have a high PKD of 25% but has a KD of 60% would be considered a good opportunity that is moderately competitive.

Balance Difficulty and Search Volume

Search volume is a clue for how often users are searching for a keyword, and difficulty provides a measurement of the competition. The keywords with monthly search volumes between 11 and 100 usually have a difficulty level of about 39%.

This opens up a great chance for the little guys to shine. Finding this balance allows you to maximize your traffic potential while not stretching yourself too thin.

For instance, a keyword like “best coffee grinder under $50” may have manageable difficulty and consistent searches, making it a practical choice.

Consider User Intent

User intent makes an impact not only on keyword relevance but keyword difficulty as well. Determine if a keyword is informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial – intent matters.

Informational keyword searches, such as “how to make coffee,” can have lower difficulty, yet still need well-researched content. Analyze your top-ranking competitors for quality of backlinks and content to accurately measure competition.

Keyword Difficulty and Content Strategy

Keyword difficulty is one of the most important factors to consider when building a winning content strategy. The keyword difficulty score indicates how hard it is to rank for a keyword on search engine results pages (SERPs). Read more. Get to know this metric and you’ll be well on your way to maximizing your content planning prowess. Choose keywords that match your goals, audience, and available resources.

Integrate Difficulty into Planning

In other words, when you are planning new content to create, keyword difficulty should inform your strategy. It’s not something to use in a vacuum, but rather in conjunction with search volume. A keyword with difficulty in the 20s or 30s can be a good target for starting pages on younger or less established websites.

Its relatively low competition allows you to establish authority more efficiently. Going after high-volume keywords with a difficulty of around 76% will be best for older sites that have a robust backlink portfolio. Tools such as Ahrefs determine difficulty by looking at the referring domains of pages that rank at the top. This additional analysis provides a more granular understanding for more accurate targeting.

Optimize Resource Allocation

For instance, low-difficulty keywords might need little to no backlink building, freeing up more time to focus on producing excellent, informative, compelling content. On the flip side, high-difficulty keywords require the strongest of strategies, like generating support in the form of backlinks from high-authority websites.

This is why using several SEO tools covers your bases and helps you manage those requirements.

Manage Expectations Realistically

Targeting low KD doesn’t automatically lead to poor rankings, and the reverse is true. Put your efforts, instead, on keeping it relevant and continually optimizing it. Keep in mind that keyword difficulty is not the same as Google Keyword Planner’s “Competition” score, which evaluates ad bidding.

Impact on Overall Content Strategy

Focus on the keywords that best serve your target audience and help you achieve your goals. Include difficulty scores in your editorial calendar, rounding out low-difficulty easy wins with higher-difficulty long-term plays.

This tactic is key to building ongoing, long-term, compounding growth in organic traffic and rankings.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is a hypothetical metric that attempts to determine how difficult a keyword would be to rank for in search engine results pages (SERPs). It will really depend on your competition, search volume, and the quality of your content. In general, the higher the keyword difficulty, the harder it is to rank.

Why is keyword difficulty important?

Keyword difficulty helps you identify the best opportunities for ranking in search results. This way, you can avoid wasting time and resources by ensuring that the keywords you’re attempting to rank for are realistic and attainable.

How do tools calculate keyword difficulty?

Tools determine keyword difficulty based on factors such as domain authority, backlink profiles, and competitive intensity. Other tools take it a step further and evaluate the quality of content that’s already ranking on the keyword.

What are the best tools for checking keyword difficulty?

Some of the most popular tools are Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and Ubersuggest. Each of these platforms gives you access to a wealth of metrics that can help you judge keyword competition and ranking potential.

How do I choose keywords based on difficulty?

These are the keywords you want to target, as they provide the best opportunity to rank but still bring quality traffic to your site.

Can high-difficulty keywords still be worth pursuing?

Maybe not, unless you’re a robust, authoritative site with great content. Although high-difficulty keywords tend to have high traffic potential, they take a lot more time and resources to successfully rank for.

How does keyword difficulty affect content strategy?

Understanding keyword difficulty allows you to prioritize the right topics to focus on and optimize your content appropriately. By targeting reasonably achievable difficulty levels, you can make sure your content not only ranks the highest but reaches the right audience.