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SEO Keyword Difficulty
About a month ago I started my first website and have been trying to understand SEO Keyword Difficulty. For example one keyword phrase on ubersuggest say the difficulty is 6/100 and on semrush it says its like 78%. How do I tell which one is more accurate?
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16 Replies
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You can go right to the source in google search console.
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Honestly I don’t understand the keyword difficultly in any of these tools. Sometimes I rank for keywords they say are difficult without a ton of effort. Sometimes not.
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My opinion, keyword tools are not that accurate. Sure they are relative when you compare keywords within the tool, but not against other tools.
Obvs depends what keywords you’re going after, but these days I focus on local keywords an its’ like knocking out 3rd graders….most local businesses know nothing about SEO, so I’m like 10 steps ahead of them with very little effort.
Works well, and has allowed me to build a biz I can only dream of.
But yea – don’t read too much into keyword tools.
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to be honest, no one can give you the exact prediction. And with Uber Suggest, it’s just a kid and they are just starting, when I rechecked their metric with Ahrefs and Semrush, it was completely different. We should at least give 1 year for Ubersuggest to grow.
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The “keyword difficulties” from those resources are not reliable at all.If you want to know how many people/companies are aimed to get that keyword, in other words, to know how difficult is to rank by that KW, check it on Google Keyword Planner. That’s the only realistic resource for those instances.
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I use ahrefs and look at the top few results. I have a keyword that’s rank 3rd of page 2 with only 6 backlinks.
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Google Search Console is the best tool for this. Other tools won’t give you proper results and instead will confuse you with the results.
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Go and get queries from Google search console
Ultimate data for search terms with accurate metrics
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I’d poke at keywords.
Basically, create a YouTube video, medium article, etc. that is optimized for that keyword. Monitor the SERPs for results.
Anything that shows up in the first 10 is medium. Anything that shows up in the first 5 pages is easy. Anything that hits page 2 or above is SUPER easy.
You can prioritize the medium keywords by sending 10 crappy PBN links to each of those pages. Anything that hits page 1 is significantly easier than the others.
Other than that, go after the highest traffic keywords and monitor GSC data for additional opportunities.
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Manually analyze the sites ranking for that keyword. How many links do they have to the domain? To that page? Do they have that kw mentioned in the title? Headings? Copy?
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Totally useless metric.
It’s based on the top ranking domains for a search, and an estimation of the value and quality of THEIR backlinks.
But it’s the AVERAGE of ALL those domains on the front page. Soooo if there is ONE domain that’s weaker than the others, that you could easily bump out, boom you’ve sacrificed a keyword because a big number scared you off
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Welcome to the club. None of it are accurate, even on prediction levels.
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just a question, is it even worth having SEMrush and other SEO keyword tools? SEMrush is pretty expensive
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Like most people have said they aren’t too accurate. Within a tool, using the math that code uses its relevant though. I wouldn’t compare them across sites but rather compile the keywords you want to rank on and take into account the difficulty when making decisions about how long to make content, which pages to focus on backlinks, etc. higher difficulty might require more work, lower difficulty might be easier.
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Let me teach you the allintitle trick
Let’s assume URLs without the keywords in the title tag are not competitors, we can know the real numbers.
Using allintitle:keywords you will return URLs with keywords in the title tag.
Below 5 000 results, consider the query low competition. Between 5 000 and 10 000 results, it’s medium. Above 10 000, it’s highly competitive.
You can also use intitle: but results are looser.
There is nothing scientific in my tip, but it’s been working for me since I started SEO in 2004.
Moreover, it’s as scientific as Keyword Difficulty scores by SEO Tools.
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