Keyword difficulty
Third-party estimates of how hard it is to rank for a term.
What keyword difficulty means
Keyword difficulty is a score that SEO tools give to estimate how hard it would be to rank for a search term, usually on a scale of 0 to 100. Each tool calculates it differently, mostly from the link strength of pages that currently rank. It's a third-party estimate. Google doesn't publish any such score.
Seen in practice
A specialist removals firm sees "piano removals" marked as very difficult because national directories rank. Looking at the results, it notices none of them explain the process in detail. It writes a thorough, first-hand guide with photos of real jobs and starts appearing for local piano moving searches.
Why it matters for your content
Difficulty scores are a useful first filter, but they're blunt. They rarely account for local results, search intent or how well the current top pages actually answer the query. A "hard" phrase where the top results are weak or off-topic can be easier than the score suggests.
It's most useful when comparing options. If two phrases suit the same page, the lower-difficulty one may be the better place to start, but your knowledge of what customers buy still matters more.
Checking your own pages
Use difficulty as a rough guide, then look at the real results. Are they relevant? Are they local? Are they from businesses like yours or from huge publishers? Combine that with your own Search Console data. Phrases where you already get impressions are usually more realistic targets than new ones.
Traps to avoid
- Avoiding every phrase with a high score.
- Treating scores from different tools as comparable.
- Ignoring local results, which tools often don't reflect.
- Forgetting search intent when judging difficulty.
Related content terms
- Search volume: An estimate of how often a query is searched. Treat tool figures as rough estimates.
- Domain authority: A third-party score that estimates a site's ranking strength. It isn't a Google metric.
- Keyword: A word or phrase people type into search engines, used to plan pages and measure visibility.
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