What is the difficulty of the word keyword difficulty?

When you plan to do proper SEO for your site, one of the things that will help you is choosing the right keywords for the content. In order to choose the right keywords, you must observe its important factors, one of which is the difficulty of the keyword. Basically, the degree of difficulty of the keyword represents the level of competition in that keyword.
For this reason, the harder the keyword, the more competition there is and the more people have worked on it. So, to get the best rank in that keyword, you have to work on this keyword more than other competitors.
If you want to know more about this factor in choosing a keyword; Stay with us until the end of this educational article.

What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword Difficulty, which is also called keyword competition; It actually shows you how competitive that keyword is in Google results. It also determines the amount of work required on that keyword to get the best ranking in the results for that keyword.
For example, the older, more powerful and more up-to-date your competitors are in the Google results for a keyword such as (clothes shopping), the more difficult it will be for the keyword (clothes shopping). Here, being stronger means good and strong SEO or a well-known brand, etc.

The importance of determining the keyword difficulty

By checking the difficulty of the keyword, you will find out how much competition there is in the word you are looking for and how long it will take for your site to rise in the Google results with that word or how much it should cost?
In general, the more competitive or difficult the words are, the more money and time must be spent for that word to get a good rank in Google results.
Here the power of your site is also very important. For example, the time it took to establish the site or how the site works and things like that play a role in the strength of your site.
The production of SEO content will also be very important. One of the most important things to do in order to have a very good article is to determine the keywords intelligently. For this reason, the difficulty of words is one of the factors to determine and find suitable keywords.
If the competition for a keyword is too high, it will be very difficult to get a high ranking in the search results. Therefore, by checking this factor, you can remove the words that have a high degree of difficulty from your list. Because working on the SEO of these types of words will be very difficult, time-consuming and expensive.

Factors affecting keyword difficulty

Text quality, internal SEO, domain credibility, number of backlinks, backlink quality, page credibility, keyword search rate, site strength and credibility, etc. are among the important and influential factors in keyword difficulty. We will explain some of the most important ones below.

Text quality

You will not rank without producing quality content. Google’s mission is to provide the most relevant and reliable information, and this dictates that you produce the highest quality text. If you want to rank for a keyword, make sure your text is at least as good as it should be. However, in order to rank, you need to go beyond what has already been ranked and find out how you can add more value and go beyond what is in the SERPs. To compete in the SERPs, you need to invest in quality content.

Domain validity

Building a reputation that ranks takes time, which is one of the reasons why SEO pays off in the long run to really show a return on investment (ROI). You need to earn the right to rank.

Backlink quality

Next to text, backlinks are one of the top three ranking factors in Google (the others being RankBrain, the machine learning technology used to sort search results).
You should consider the quality of the backlinks of the pages that are already ranked in the SERP and draw a link building strategy to get links that will build your credibility. As with texts, to compete in the SERPs, it is important to get quality links to rank.

Methods of measuring keyword difficulty

In this part of the educational article, we want to teach you 7 methods of measuring the degree of keyword difficulty. So stay with us in the rest of this article.

1. Using the keyword difficulty estimation tool

The first method to measure the degree of difficulty of keywords is to use the tools available in this field. In this section, we tried to introduce the best tools for estimating the degree of difficulty of keywords for you:

CanIRank site

One of the best and most popular tools in the field of SEO and tracking the degree of difficulty of keywords is the CanIRank site.

Moz site

The Moz tool is one of the best tools that you can use in the field of SEO and learning SEO for free.

KW Finder site

The KW Finder tool allows you to find the difficulty level of keywords in any language. In this tool, by entering your desired country and language, you will get the difficulty level of your keyword.

SEMrush site

SEMrush tool is one of the most professional sites for determining keyword difficulty and website analysis. Using this tool, you can not only determine the difficulty of each keyword, but also check the difficulty of your website and competitors’ keywords. Using this service is not free, but if you use it, it provides you with nearly 40 different tools so that you can get any information you want in the field of keywords.

2. Checking the number of referring domains

The importance of the number of linking domains is very important for Google. This means that the more backlinks your site receives from other sites, the better it can rank in Google. So don’t neglect the Referring Domains criterion. You can check the number of backlinks received by your site through the tools that exist in this field. One of the best tools in this field is the Aherfs site.

3. Research on optimizing competitors’ content

One of the things that should be paid attention to is the internal SEO of your competitor’s website. For this purpose, you should find the top ten sites in the search results for your desired keyword and check them for internal SEO. If the sites you reviewed perform well in terms of internal SEO, your work will be difficult. But if they don’t have good internal SEO, even with high credibility, you can surpass their page in search results with proper SEO and optimization.

4. Page authority or Page Authority

Many factors influence the ranking of pages by Google, one of the most important of which is page authority. You can measure the validity of your website using various tools that exist in this field.

5. Checking the link profile of sites

If you want to rank well for a specific keyword, check the link profiles of the sites that are in the top results. Sometimes, some sites may have good domain and page authority, but because of using illegal methods, they get top results in Google. In this case, the high ranking of these sites will not last!
So, if you want to achieve a top ranking in the results of a keyword, be sure to check the link profile of the top sites in the results of this keyword. To find out with what technique they have achieved this position. This can also be done through the Aherfs tool.

6. Domain authority or Domain Authority

Domain authority is another important factor for Google to rank sites. That is, the more reliable your site is; You will be more likely to get a better ranking in Google search results. True, according to what we said earlier, page authority is much more important, but domain authority is also not without influence.
Of course, you should pay attention to domain validity. Because very big brands like YouTube and Amazon get better ranks even against small brands with high page authority.

7. Find keywords with low competition

The last factor we recommend is to find keywords with few and weak competitors. This means choosing a keyword or phrase that your competitors are weak in and doesn’t meet certain factors that you can outrank.

How to calculate keyword difficulty

SEMrush difficulty is ranked from 0 to 100, from easiest to hardest:
From (0–14) very easy: these scores are the best opportunity to quickly enter new web pages in Google without the need for backlinks.
From (15 to 29) Easy: Although these terms are competitive, they are possible to rank when you are just starting out. To rank this category, you need high-quality content that fits the user’s needs.
From (30–49) possible: the competition for this category is somewhat higher. You need good, distinctive content that is properly optimized for your keywords.
From (50–69) Problem: To compete in this category, you need a few backlinks and structured, useful and optimized content.
From (85–100) Hard: There is more competition in this category. These keywords require more effort to get your useful and optimized content to rank among the top pages, especially if you’re looking to play with Google’s algorithm in new ways.

last word

In the end, it should be said that you should be careful in choosing keywords for your content. Because these keywords will have a significant impact on your site’s SEO. So you should choose them based on the factors affecting the keywords; One of these important factors is the degree of difficulty of the keyword or the level of competition in it.
We hope that this tutorial was useful for you and that you got acquainted with the concept of keyword difficulty and its measurement methods. If you have any questions or problems regarding this tutorial, you can express it in the comment section.