{"id":15494,"date":"2022-09-23T13:54:54","date_gmt":"2022-09-23T13:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/keyword-difficulty-how-do-you-measure-it\/462536\/"},"modified":"2022-09-23T13:54:54","modified_gmt":"2022-09-23T13:54:54","slug":"keyword-difficulty-how-do-you-measure-it-via-sejournal-benjarriola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/?p=15494","title":{"rendered":"Keyword Difficulty: How Do You Measure It? via @sejournal, @benjarriola"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Keyword difficulty is a metric used by SEO pros to help quantify how easy or hard it is to break into the search engine results.<\/p>\n

It gives the SEO pros a way to gauge the level of effort needed to optimize for that search engine results page (SERP), which can further aid in SEO strategies when deciding which keywords to prioritize<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How Is Keyword Difficulty Measured?<\/h2>\n

Keyword difficulty can come in a variety of metrics<\/a> from various tools.<\/p>\n

In some cases, keyword difficulty is synonymous with keyword competition or competitiveness.<\/p>\n

Or, you may hear some SEO professionals in the industry simply refer to it as competition or competitiveness.<\/p>\n

Moz\u2019s Keyword Difficulty<\/h3>\n

Probably the first company to actually use the term keyword difficulty (KD) was Moz within its own keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer.<\/p>\n

Moz assigns a value from 1 to 100, where 100 is very difficult to rank for, and 1 would be very easy.<\/p>\n

Moz does not share its specific proprietary formula<\/a> on how it is computed, but the company does mention that it takes into account page authority (PA), domain authority (DA), and projected clickthrough rates (CTR).<\/p>\n

PA and DA are also proprietary metrics by Moz that Google does not use.<\/p>\n

These metrics are Moz\u2019s attempt to assign a quality metric to serve as a proxy for Google\u2019s PageRank score<\/a>, which was once a public score Google gave to the public.<\/p>\n

Moz uses known ranking factors that Google also evaluates to come up with these scores.<\/p>\n

Moz has an API, and often, the keyword difficulty metric you see in other tools could be coming from Moz.<\/p>\n

Google Ads Keyword Planner Competition Metric<\/h3>\n

Some SEO pros prefer the Google Ads Keyword Planner Competition metric.<\/p>\n

Google defines this value<\/a> as the number of advertisers that showed on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google.<\/p>\n

You will often see this expressed as a number with two decimal places between 0 and 1, where 1 is the most difficult to rank for, and 0 is the easiest.<\/p>\n

It is important to note that this tool was intended for Google Ads users.<\/p>\n

But the logic behind this metric is that keywords that are harder to rank for in pay-per-click (PPC)<\/a> ads are also the keywords that are often also harder to rank for in organic search.<\/p>\n

Google Ads Keyword Planner CPC Metric<\/h3>\n

Similar to the competition metric of Keyword Planner mentioned above, Keyword Planner\u2019s CPC Metric is primarily intended to be used by Google Ads advertisers.<\/p>\n

Since CPC is the cost per click, it is also somewhat reflective of how competitive a keyword is organically.<\/p>\n

The CPC metric you see will be the average CPC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some SEO pros may decide to use this because the more difficult it is to rank for a keyword, the higher the willingness to pay more to rank for it in PPC.<\/p>\n

Since this is a cost, the values here are in dollar figures that can be a fraction of a dollar or slightly more than a dollar, ranging from a few cents to several dollars but typically staying below $10.<\/p>\n

Number Of Search Results<\/h3>\n

Many SEO professionals use the number of search results that appear when searching for a keyword in Google as a metric reflective of keyword difficulty.<\/p>\n

The logic behind this is that the more results that appear for this keyword, the more we believe competitors are also trying to rank for it.<\/p>\n

Some use specific search operators to fine-tune this number, such as the following operators:<\/p>\n