Difficulty

In this guide you will learn more about the Difficulty metric seen in Keyword Explorer.

Quick Links

• Overview of the Difficulty Metric
• The Nitty Gritty Details
• What’s a good score?

You will see the Difficulty score for a keyword noted in the Explore by Keyword and Explore by Site sections of Keyword Explorer as well as within your Keyword Lists.

Difficulty shows you how tough it would be to rank in the top 10 spots for that keyword. We arrive at this score by analyzing the strength of the top 10 organic blue links on the search engine results page (SERP). A Difficulty score of 1 is not difficult at all, and 100 is very difficult.

This gives you an idea of how much of an uphill climb it will be to rank for that keyword: for anything scoring over 40, pack an overnight bag, and for keywords with a Difficulty score over 60, you'd better pack your climbing gear.

Keyword Difficulty in Keyword Explorer takes into account the Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) scores of the results ranking on the first page of Google for the given query, as well as modifying intelligently for projected click-through rate (CTR) of a given page. Keyword Difficulty puts more weight on higher-ranking, more visible pages, and less weight on lower-ranking, less visible pages. The formula also accounts for newer pages on powerful domains that may have DA scores but have not yet been assigned PA values. The scores roughly correspond to a weighted average of the PA of the top 10, and the other inputs (DA, homepages, query term use, etc.) modify that weighted average.

Difficulty is on a scale of 1-100, where 100 is very difficult. Use this metric to compare keywords within your niche and set your expectations. Broadly speaking, a higher keyword Difficulty score means it will be more difficult to compete with the already-ranking results, and a lower Difficulty score means it's likely to be easier. But there are many variables.

There's no single score that's always good or always bad. It all depends on your situation and what you're seeking to accomplish. It can also be good to compare to other keywords that you’re researching to figure out in a set of keywords, what is considered to be a low or high difficulty. We generally see keywords getting significantly tougher to rank for at a Difficulty score of around 40. Once you venture much above the 40 mark, things change a bit. Why? Well, there is more competition on the SERP for that keyword. It can become tougher for smaller sites to break into competitive SERPs like these, and it'll take some serious investment and research to rank for keywords on the upper end of the Difficulty scale.

The best way to think about a Difficulty score is as a predictor for the level of challenge an "average" website will have ranking for that keyword. But, there are many potential modifiers, caveats, and things to consider, including:

• If you're a very powerful, important site with loads of links and other strong ranking signals, chances are you could more easily rank for higher Difficulty scoring keywords (even those in the 60s and 70s)

• Conversely, if your site is brand new or has few positive ranking signals, you may find that even lower Difficulty keywords (those in the 20s or 30s) are pretty tough

• If you are attempting to rank for keywords far outside your areas of relevance and authority (e.g. if Moz.com tried to rank for "pizza recipes" or if SeriousEats.com tried to rank for "keyword research tactics") you'll likely find that it's much harder to rank, even if the Difficulty scores look achievable

• If you're comparing multiple keywords to target with content and SEO efforts, and they have similar volumes but one is vastly lower in Difficulty, it probably makes sense to target that one first. In many ways, Difficulty is designed for precisely this -- helping to better prioritize your keyword research list

• Since DA is based on machine learning calculations, your site's score will often fluctuate as more, fewer, or different data points become available and are incorporated into those calculations. Typically, there's very few scores in the 0-20 range, and very few in the 80-100 range. You can think of scores in the 20-35 range as being quite low, 36-50 in the middle, 51-65 pretty tough, and 66-80 as very difficult.

• When you target more and more difficult keywords, you generally need A) more external links to the page B) higher domain authority C) more relevant content and D) higher user engagement and satisfaction with your content.