Keyword Difficulty: An Accurate Way to Measure Keyword Competition & Target Easy Keywords

“It’s been three months since you started handling our content, yet our website isn’t ranking for any of our targeted keywords.”

Angela read the email on her screen and took a deep breath.

She wanted to remind the client that ranking on SERPs never happens in a whiff—thanks to Google. But she changed her mind as she realized...

Google’s algorithm wasn’t to blame for her client’s inability to rank.

She felt she could do more:

• Were the keyword difficulty scores of her SEO tools wrong? 
• If they weren’t, why weren’t her client’s articles ranking for the so-called easy keywords she targeted?

Like Angela, are you a content manager struggling to rank for targeted phrases on search engines? Chances are, you’ve also asked yourself those questions.

Well, it all begins with your keyword research. And while at this phase, marketers make the mistake of rating search volume over other metrics. 

You shouldn’t judge keywords on their search volume alone. Why? Because you also have to know what it takes to rank for those keywords.

Hear it from Connor Lahey, SEO Strategist at SEMrush:

“Don't make the mistake of basing your keyword research on search volume alone.

When you do this, you'll struggle to set realistic expectations or estimate the time and resources needed to succeed.

Take the time to understand how feasible it is to rank for the keywords you want, find quick win opportunities (lower difficulty, higher-value keywords), and get buy-in for your strategy based on solid but realistic projections.“

Gordon Donnelly, Senior SEO Specialist at WordStream, said as much:

“While it’s important to know how many times in a given month your keyword is typically entered as a query, it’s equally important to understand the level of competition vying for ranking supremacy on that keyword.”

The solution is to rethink how you’ve been measuring keyword difficulty.

And this resource will walk you through four precise ways to determine a keyword’s difficulty. Specifically, you’ll see how to do it and increase your organic rankings via WriterZen, a simplified content workflow software.

Like this user did:

WriterZen review on Capterra

Keyword Difficulty & the Game of SEO 

Organic ranking is like a journey.

And like every journey, you have to know what it takes before embarking on your trip. Keyword difficulty is one metric that helps you determine from the start if a particular keyword is worth the journey or not.

It tells you a keyword’s competition and what it would cost you to rank on Google’s first page for it. Here’s the principle behind this metric:

• The higher your keyword difficulty score, the harder it is to rank for such keywords. 
• The lower the score, the easier it is to rank.

Your goal as a content manager should be investing in easy keywords. That is, keywords with low difficulty. Unfortunately, SEOers or content managers omit this step.

Like Angela, they simply pick a keyword, develop it into an article, and optimize the page only to find out they aren’t ranking at all after a while. 

You avoid this disappointment by considering keyword difficulty. This helps you determine beforehand whether or not a keyword is worth your time, effort, and money. 

Maros Kortis, CMO of Mangools, observed these benefits:

“You’ll get a good overview of what are the “hot” keywords and “big” players in your niche. You’ll be able to identify alternative keywords in your niche that you have an actual chance to rank for.  You’ll be able to save a lot of time by focusing on keywords that can bring you results even if your website does not have much authority yet.”

Consider this metric throughout your keyword research. 

It’ll help you determine how realistic your goal of ranking for a particular keyword is. It also ensures you and your content team target the most efficient keywords with enough support for successful content execution.

The Problem with How Content Managers Check Keyword Difficulty

Different tools have various keyword difficulty scores. For some, an easy keyword is one whose competitiveness level is 0-29, while others have their easy keywords on a scale of 0-10.

Since no two tools are the same, their keyword difficulty analyses also differ.

These tools usually consider content quality, backlinks quality, and domain authority to arrive at their difficulty scores. However, most of them determine the difficulty of a keyword through the total number of referring domains each page ranking for that keyword has.

In other words, all that matters to them when analyzing keyword competition is the backlinks. As such, the more referring domains there are on the top-ranking pages, the higher their keyword difficulty index.

Take SEMrush.

This SEO tool is excellent at researching keywords and providing the ideal parameters to weigh a keyword’s importance. However, it regards backlinks as the most vital factor for measuring keyword difficulty:

It’s also the same for Ahrefs. 

Here’s how they report arriving at their keyword difficulty score:

“We calculate the Ahrefs KD score by taking a trimmed mean of the number of linking domains to the current top-10 ranking pages and then plotting the result on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100.

It doesn’t take into account any other variables whatsoever.”

Both approaches don’t give an accurate keyword difficulty analysis.

Of course, backlinks, content quality, and domain authority matter when determining a keyword’s level of competition. But if you want to target keywords you actually have a chance of ranking for, you need to go beyond backlinks to other variables that these tools don’t consider.

And if you ignore them, you’ll find out when implementing the keywords that they weren’t as easy as you thought. 

That leads us to…

The Right Way to Calculate Keyword Difficulty

Like most tools, WriterZen offers a keyword difficulty scale from 0 to 100. And after analyzing, measuring, and experiencing many projects, we found other variables that affect a keyword’s difficulty:

• The amount of content written about that keyword
• The level of competition for Google Ads
• The number of mentions the brand has
• The amount of traffic of the keyword

Let’s look at them in detail:

Keyword Difficulty by Traffic

This variable determines the keyword competition by a keyword's search volume and the amount of organic search traffic you’ll need to have before ranking among the top 10 results.

If the keyword has a high search volume, you’ll find it hard to ranking for it.

Here’s a tabular representation of the relationship between keyword difficulty and the corresponding amount of organic traffic:

By implication, if a keyword falls between the scale of 10 to 20 and has about 10000 search volume, you’ll need to build about 2000 organic traffic to compete with other ranking articles.

Keyword Difficulty by Content

Here, WriterZen considers the quantity and quality of competing articles to determine the keyword difficulty by content. This metric measures keyword difficulty based on the exact number of articles vying for that keyword on SERPs. 

Here’s the relationship between Keyword Difficulty by Content and the corresponding number of articles needed:

The algorithm for determining keyword difficulty by content examines the total number of articles for a keyword on all the websites in a particular country’s market. It also analyzes the content quantity and quality of 100 competitors on SERPs. 

A quick way to measure keyword competition by content is by carrying out Allintitle keyword research.

It shows you how many websites are competing for a specific keyword by including it in their title tags.

As Google Guide explained:

“If you start your query with allintitle, Google restricts results to those containing all the query terms you specify in the title. For example, [ allintitle: detect plagiarism ] will return only documents that contain the words “detect” and “plagiarism” in the title.”

This way, you see the number of competing articles optimized for a particular keyword and decide at once if the keyword is worth your effort or not.

Here’s an example of a search result with the allintitle search operator:

From the image above, you can see “allintitle: “wedding photographers in Texas”” has about 109 results compared to a Google search for that keyword without the allintitle tag.

See:

So, as you research your keywords, use the allintitle index to see the exact number of articles you’ll be competing with for that keyword. 

Imagine you had to determine keyword competition for 1000 or 10000 keywords by running a manual Google allintitle search.

How long would you keep up before burning out?

You don’t need to go through that stress when you can simply plug your keyword into one tool, find related keywords, and the allintitle data for each of them.

WriterZen’s simplified content workflow is that tool.

And there’s a plus when using it to get allintitle for measuring keyword difficulty by content: 

You not only see the number of competing articles for that keyword. You also get fast-ranking keywords through the Golden Filter.

Hear it from a happy WriterZen user:

WriterZen review on Capterra

Keyword Difficulty by Mention (or Signal)

This keyword competition index works by measuring the number of times users mention the competing brands that appear on search results. The higher the number of mentions, the more competitive the keyword is. 

For this analysis, WriterZen measured 300 million websites. Then we recommended the corresponding number of mentions you have to build to rank for that keyword among the top ten results:

Keyword by Adword

WriterZen also measures how difficult or easy a keyword is by Google’s PPC standard.

The logic is simple: If it has high competition for Google ads, its competition for organic traffic will also be high.

Keyword Difficulty by Links

Like other tools, WriterZen also determines keyword difficulty scores by the number of referring domains needed. 

Here’s the relationship between the keyword difficulty and the number of referring links needed

By this factor, if a particular keyword’s difficulty is 30-40, you need about 55 backlinks to rank.

WriterZen embedded these different parameters to create one keyword difficulty metric with a solid algorithm.  Combine all these to get an accurate keyword difficulty index that will crown your SEO efforts with organic ranking and traffic.

How to Check Keyword Difficulty Using an SEO Tool 

61% of marketers say growing organic presence on their websites is one of their top inbound marketing priorities.

And to achieve this, SEO best practices like checking keyword difficulty become a necessity.

You’ve seen how WriterZen brings different factors to play to give you an accurate keyword difficulty score. How about you go right inside the tool, so you know how these variables work together?

For that, let’s plug in the keyword “online learning” into WriterZen’s Keyword Explorer and determine its difficulty by the metrics mentioned earlier:

Per the results, if you were to target that keyword, you can see what it’ll cost you based on the keyword difficulty score.

And as you scroll down, you’ll find other keywords related to “online learning.” Should you find any that suits your SEO campaign, simply click on it, and you’ll have its keyword competition alongside other relevant metrics on your screen.

See for yourself:

What’s more?

Also on the Keyword Explorer are the Allintitle and Golden Filter functions. They help you determine keyword difficulty by competing articles and suggest easy-to-rank keywords for your content marketing SEO strategy.

You can set your allintitle limit to any minimum or maximum number you wish. This helps you find keywords with a comfortable allintitle:

Similarly, the Golden Filter ensures you target keywords that won’t take an eternity to rank on SERPs and boost your organic traffic.

If you don’t want to enter your limits into the allintitle function, simply toggle at the Golden Filter and use either of these options:

• Ranking Probability: This one is for low-authority websites. It helps find fast-ranking keywords to boost your organic growth by filtering keywords by their probability of ranking fast on selected SERP positions from 1 to 100. 

You can adjust the filter to get keywords with as low as ten allintitle and as high as 100 allintitle.

• Potential Value: This option sorts low-competition keywords by their commercial potential. It’s suitable for high-authority websites with enough resources to target difficult keywords. 

When you toggle this filter, you get keywords with higher allintitle and a compensating higher search volume. 

Here’s the Golden Filter in action:

Consider Your SEO Goals as You Determine Keyword Difficulty 

While you need to calculate keyword difficulty before embarking on an SEO project, remember this:

A keyword with low or high difficulty doesn’t matter if it doesn’t suit your SEO campaign.

Hear it from Gordon Donnelly, Senior SEO Specialist at WordStream:

“A keyword with high volume and low difficulty are useless if it doesn’t fit your marketing objective—so it’s pivotal to understand not just what people are searching for, but why they’re searching for it.”

Prioritize your marketing objectives over any keyword that seems easy to rank. And if, when considering your SEO campaign, you realize the keywords fundamental to your business are hard, still target them.

But combine them with low-difficulty keywords that won’t take long to rank.

Doing this will position you to reach your ultimate goal, which is to get a good position on SERPs and garner organic traffic that’ll yield more revenue.

This is all possible with WriterZen. 

It’s why our users talk about us across all channels: