Keyword Difficulty refers to evaluating how hard it is to rank in Google’s organic search results for a particular term. A keyword’s difficulty depends on several elements, including domain authority, page authority, and content quality.
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Why Is Keyword Difficulty Important to Understand?
Whether or not you’re aware of it, keyword difficulty affects your strategy and resource planning. If you comprehend it, you can target the most efficient keywords for your site and guarantee your team has the help they require to make successful content.
Keyword difficulty can assist you in determining how real your goal is to rank a new page. You can utilize that knowledge to map your content plan and give resources to support it. You can even order digital marketing services based on this data to reach your goals faster.
Important Factors in Keyword Difficulty Estimating
How do you understand how hard a keyword is? A few various elements come into play, including:
- Competitors
- Content quality
- Search intent
- Backlinks
- Domain authority
● Competitors
To compete for that number one search result, you must first know who else is trying to win it, just as you do. But the thing is, your competition may not be who you anticipate.
That’s precisely where SEO competitive analysis comes in.
Typically, you’ll have three distinct types of competition to worry about:
Your industry competitors: other companies are selling identical products or services to a similar audience.
SEO competitors: other domains that write content for an identical audience and contest for a similar keyword profile
Competitors for this Keyword: Who is ranking, right now, for the exact keyword you want to target is an important factor in estimating keyword difficulty too.
In most cases, these three categories will overlap. After all, your industry competitors may also be making content and targeting an audience similar to yours. But it’s not assured. Knowing about Competitive intelligence might help you with this too.
● Content Quality
You’re not supposed to rank without creating quality content. It’s as straightforward as that and no SEO company can change this fact.
But what is quality content?
To answer this, take a look at Google’s mission statement.
Search is supposed to provide the most pertinent and trustworthy information available.
That means that above all, you should aim to deliver content that’s not only applicable to your audience’s requirements but also trustworthy and engaging. Then optimize that content so that Google can discover, understand, and deliver it to your readers when they require it.
● Search Intent
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to write good content. It must be the correct content if you desire Google to rank it or your audience to click on it. That’s where search intent becomes a factor in keyword difficulty estimating.
Search intent is the type of content a searcher is looking for when entering a keyword. It’s simple as that and you wouldn’t need any online marketing agency to tell you the user’s intention. There are four different types:
Informational: The user desires to educate themselves on a topic
Commercial: The user is researching before deciding to buy
Transactional: The user chooses to buy something
Navigational: The user desires to find a specific page
● Backlink Quality
While Google’s ranking elements have evolved, the presence and quality of backlinks are still essential considerations for SEO. Google tells us as much in the support article on how search algorithms work.
Quality backlinks — inbound links that come from authoritative sources — tell search engines such as Google that your content is likely trustworthy. This allows you to create your domain’s authority and increase the keyword difficulty of the phrases you rank for.
● Domain Authority
The reality is that a new domain will work to rank for competitive keywords at first. It takes time to make up the authority you require to beat the SERPs — particularly when the competition is already set as an authority in your space.
Domain authority affects keyword problems in two ways:
Your own: If your website is brand new or has low authority, it will be more challenging to show search engines that your content is more valuable and trustworthy than the competition.
Your competition: If your primary competitors for a keyword are well-appointed with high authority, beating them from the top spots will be even more demanding.
Don’t misunderstand establishing your keyword research on search volume alone.
When you do this, you’ll work to set accurate anticipations or evaluate the time and resources required to succeed.
Conclusion Of Keyword Difficulty
Take the time to understand how possible it is to rank for the keywords you desire, find quick win possibilities, and get buy-in for your system established on solid but accurate projections.
Utilize the Keyword Difficulty Score as a guide, and mix this with insights on your domain’s authority and ability to rank to make a roadmap of actions that sets you up for development.
There are plenty of keyword research instruments to try out to get started.
