What’s The Most Accurate Way to Check Keyword Difficulty?

Keyword Difficulty is one of the metrics we marketers use to help decide what topics we want to cover in blog posts, and which will end up being a waste of time. Ideally, it works in conjunction with a handful of other metrics to provide useful prioritization data for a list of potential topics. Unfortunately, it’s also often misunderstood and used incorrectly. So, I wanted to talk about it.

So today, let’s talk about what keyword difficulty is, how to measure it, and how to make effective use of the information you get.

What is Keyword Difficulty?

In simple terms, keyword difficulty is a measurement of how difficult it is likely to be to get a new piece of content to rank in the top 10 search results for a given keyword as a query.

It’s usually expressed either as a broad category or as a percentage. A keyword might be rated Low Difficulty, Medium Difficulty, or High Difficulty, or it might just be a number from 1 to 100. The specific mechanism of rating it, as well as what those numbers or categories actually mean, can vary from tool to tool.

Note: Google, in their Keyword Planner and in other tools, provides a “keyword competitiveness” rating for keywords. Many people view this as keyword difficulty, but it’s actually a little different. Rather than looking at organic search results, Keyword Competitiveness looks at the competition in PPC auctions for that keyword. While the two can have a correlation, it’s not always the case, so you often want to avoid conflating these two metrics.

The goal of a keyword difficulty measurement is simply to give you an idea of where you should be focusing your efforts in content marketing. When you do keyword research, you end up with lists of hundreds or thousands of potential keywords and topics to cover. You only have so much time in a day, so much effort you can put into creating content, and so much budget to pay for things like writing or graphic design. Which topics do you put your money and effort into?

If you focus your efforts into low difficulty keywords, you’ll fairly easily be able to rank in the top spots in Google searches for those topics. That can be fine, but the issue you run into is that many of those topics are low volume. They’re low difficulty because the potential returns are also small.

If you focus your efforts on high difficulty keywords, it will be exceedingly challenging, if not outright impossible, to rank for the keyword. Think of a keyword like “iPhone”. The top results for that keyword are sites like Apple, Wikipedia, Best Buy, Reddit, iCloud, Walmart, telecom sites like Verizon, and product search results. The only way you could possibly compete is if you’re a large retailer selling iPhones, and even then, it’s your store page, not your content marketing, that can rank.

A middle ground would be ideal, right? Something with better search volume, but not completely impossible to rank. That’s the idea behind keyword difficulty.

How is Keyword Difficulty Calculated?

Here’s where things get a little tricky. Each different tool providing keyword difficulty metrics does so using a different data set and a different calculation.

You can still get an idea by looking at the kinds of data that go into the calculations. You generally have information such as:

• The keyword’s overall search volume. A keyword with higher volume generally has higher competition. You can also look into a site’s traffic from a given keyword to determine their market share and how dominant they are for that keyword.
• The keyword’s cost per click for Google Ads. Like I mentioned in my note above, PPC and organic search aren’t entirely aligned, but generally speaking, a keyword with a more expensive CPC is going to have more demand and competition.
• The SERPs themselves. It used to be that Google would provide ten results on the SERPs, but these days, you can find SERPs that barely have five results, mixed in with other kinds of results like products, maps, local listings, infoboxes, and so on. This can make ranking more challenging… but also present an opportunity if you can fit in one of those enhanced boxes.
• Strength of competition. Every query has results, and those are the competition you have to beat to rank. Are those competitors on the same level as you, or much higher (or lower) than you in terms of SEO metrics?

Nowadays, you can also see tools that do an on-page analysis of the content that is actually ranking. It’s always possible that substandard content is ranking because of the strength of the domain hosting it, and good enough content can overpower it.

Some of these tools can also take into account things like search intent. It can be hard for a tool to estimate search intent, especially for trickier keywords. But if you can get a good idea of whether or not existing content matches the search intent, and if you can match it better, it can be an opportunity.

What Are the Most Accurate Keyword Difficulty Tools?

The best keyword difficulty analysis is one you conduct on your own. But that’s tedious, time-consuming, and requires you to have access to big data tools to give you the information necessary. Since those tools often just have their own keyword difficulty analysis, you can just use that instead.

The question is, which of the extant tools is the most accurate?

It’s pretty hard to say for sure, if we’re being honest here. Since keyword difficulty is contextual to your own site’s strengths and weaknesses, the numbers you get from various tools may be more or less accurate for different people.

My recommendation is to explore different tools and compare their results against your experiences, to find the one that is most accurate for you specifically. That said, here are options to try.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of my go-to tools for a lot of different kinds of data. They have one of the biggest non-Google indexes of internet sites and metrics out there, and as a result, their information tends to be pretty useful.

The free keyword difficulty check allows you to check one keyword at a time. It gives you a numeric rating and an estimate (for example, “Keyword Difficulty Tool” as a keyword clocks in at “62 – Hard”), and shows you the overview of the SERPs for that keyword. The top three entries in the SERPs also show you the DR, UR, number of backlinks, number of linking domains, estimated traffic, and estimated keywords for the site.

You also get all of this and a whole lot more in the actual Ahrefs dashboard, but that’s a paid account. I definitely recommend it for many other reasons, but if all you want is some simple keyword difficulty estimates, the free tool works.

Semrush

Semrush is probably my second choice after Ahrefs for a lot of things. They also have a massive data index and a lot of useful information, presented in handy ways rather than in messy charts and tables you need to interpret.

Semrush’s estimates are also numeric from 1 to 100, but they break them into six tiers from Very Easy to Very Hard.

What makes Semrush fairly unique is that they actually give you two keyword difficulty estimates. One is generic, but the other is Personal Difficulty. This requires them to be able to understand what your site is, because they want to use information about you, like your overall topic, your link weight, and your domain authority. With that information, they can adjust their keyword difficulty estimate for your site specifically.

Some people find this less accurate or useful than others, but it’s worth giving a look if you have access to a Semrush account.

Mangools

Mangools’ keyword difficulty check tool requires you to create a free account to access the data, but it gives you a lot of information for free when you do so. You get the numeric and category estimates, you get search volume data, you get the full rundown of information for sites already in the results for that keyword, and all that good stuff.

Beyond that, they also give you a lot more you can use to explore keywords. You can see related keywords, with their search volume, CPC, PPC, and difficulties, and you can filter and narrow your results by geographic area and language.

In general, I’ve found that the actual numbers Mangools gives you are a little different from what other tools do, but their categories account for it.

It’s worth a mention that Mangools pulls data from several other big data providers, like Moz and Majestic, both to populate these extra data fields and to go into their calculation.

Moz

Speaking of Moz, their Keyword Explorer includes keyword difficulty as one of the free metrics you can see when you do a search without an account. Moz is a well-known and trusted name, and I generally find their data to be decent.

The biggest downside is that you are limited to just three free keyword checks per day unless you pay for Moz Pro. You also don’t actually get very much data for free; it’s just the difficulty, search volume, some related keywords, and not much else. You can pay for Pro, it’s a fine platform, but the free tool falls a little flat.

Other Tools

There are also a bunch of other options out there to explore.

Some of them aren’t actually different, though, so keep that in mind. For example, the Exploding Topics free keyword difficulty checker is just powered by Semrush, and in fact will only give you detailed data if you link it to your existing Semrush account… at which point you can just use Semrush’s version of the tool.

That said, if you know of a good, accurate keyword difficulty tool that I didn’t mention here, let me know in the comments.

How Can You Use Keyword Difficulty Data?

The biggest trick with keyword difficulty is that, as a stand-alone metric, it doesn’t actually do much for you. Semrush knows this, which is why they implemented personal difficulty.

For one thing, you can only look up one keyword at a time, but one blog post about a topic can use and rank for dozens or hundreds of related keywords. Google uses semantic indexation these days, and the exact specific keyword you rank for might not even really be a primary keyword you targeted.

You can help mitigate this by grouping and clustering your keyword lists, checking the keyword difficulty for different terms in the cluster, and averaging it all out with a weighted average using search volume alongside difficulty. This can give you an idea of the difficulty of the overall topic rather than just the specific keyword.

You’ll also want to benchmark your current performance as it compares to the difficulty. A big site with a lot of SEO power can tackle higher-difficulty keywords with ease, while a smaller or brand-new site will struggle even with easy keywords.

You can do this in a few ways. The Semrush personal difficulty is one option. Another is to find keywords you already rank well for, and check the difficulty of them to see where you stand. You can also find keywords of different difficulty levels, create content for them, and see whether or not (and how well) you rank for them.

Once you have a baseline and an idea of how accurate the data is, you can harvest keyword difficulty info for your whole keyword list and figure out where to focus your efforts.

Finally, don’t forget that keyword difficulty is just one estimate. There are a lot of ways you can cut through the chaff and outrank even much better sites, if your content is that much better or if you’re more aligned with search intent. Don’t let a high difficulty rating overly discourage you, just use the info to temper your expectations.

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