Keyword difficulty: What it is and why it’s important in SEO

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Keyword difficulty, also known as keyword competitiveness or search volume difficulty, is a metric that indicates how difficult it would be to rank for a certain keyword, given the current state of the SERPs. 

While Google doesn’t share exactly how it determines keyword difficulty, Calgary SEO Company said you do need to know that it takes into consideration things like average position and number of results per page.

What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is the measure of how hard it is to rank for a given keyword. There are many ways to calculate keyword difficulty, but most rely on two important factors:

  • The number of searches conducted on Google per month for that keyword
  • The strength of the competition (how many other websites are also targeting that term)

Keyword difficulty can help you determine if your SEO efforts are likely to be successful. If your site ranks well in search engines, it’s because it performs well on these two metrics: search volume and competition.

Why should you care about keyword difficulty?

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While keyword difficulty isn’t the only factor, Calgary SEO Agency experts suggests that you should consider when deciding which keywords to target, it can help you prioritize your efforts. 

If a keyword has a high difficulty score (meaning there are many other sites competing for that same term), it may be more challenging to rank well than if there were fewer competitors in the first place.

While this metric has its drawbacks and limitations, it can still be helpful when used correctly. Keyword difficulty is just one piece of the puzzle—you should also evaluate other metrics like search volume and competition level before you decide which keywords fit into your SEO strategy and whether or not they’re worth targeting.

How to Use Keyword Difficulty in Your SEO Strategy

Keyword difficulty can be a useful metric for SEO. It tells you how tough it will be to rank for a keyword, helping you decide which keywords are worth targeting.

If you’re new to SEO, with Calgary SEO Company is the best way to use keyword difficulty is by doing the research before you start building out your site and content. 

You can use these insights to inform decisions about where and how much time to invest in specific pages of your site. This will help ensure that you’re spending time on high-value keywords that are likely to lead to backlinks or visitors.

You can also use keyword difficulty as a way to find new keywords, especially when researching competitors’ websites. If they’ve already optimized their pages around one specific keyword, there’s a good chance the other similar variations will also perform well in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Finally, if your site already has some content up but doesn’t rank very well for any particular keywords (or ranks poorly), this could be an indication that those topics aren’t actually worth targeting—or that there are more effective ways of writing about them!

Conclusion

As you can see, keyword difficulty is an important metric that all SEOs need to take into consideration. If you are thinking about adding a new piece of content or revamping an existing one, the keyword difficulty score should be one of the first things you look at before making any decisions. The higher the score, the more difficult it will be to rank in Google for that term.