What is the Importance of Accurate Keyword Difficulty scores

With endless businesses competing for the large group of the same audience today, it is highly alarming for digital marketers to come up with a powerful and targeted content strategy to win their way through the crowded market and reach their potential customers.

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is among the vital metrics to assist marketers in formulating an effective SEO strategy to reach the top of SERPs. Keyword with a low KD score helps achieve faster results with traffic from search engines due to less competition. Keywords with high KD will have more competition in search results, resulting in less appearance at the top of the SERPs in short term. 

With KD calculation tools, one can determine the effectiveness of a keyword in search results. But, a lot can also depend on the SEO tools that the marketers use, and these are not always accurate due to the limited parameters varying from developer to developer. As a result, the KD calculation is inaccurate and can make a marketer believe that their keywords will perform better.

Semrush’s KD platform

Semrush, an online visibility management platform provider has a proven formula to achieve an accurate KD score, based on strong research into SEO patterns and customer feedback.

Semrush’s platform offers 3 steps to decode your SERP standing and opportunities.

1. SERP Analysis

Here the median value is recognized for 3 metrics throughout the URLs on the first page of search results. These are:

-> Number of referring domains pointing to the ranking URLs

-> Authority score of the ranking domains

-> Ratio of follow/no-follow links to the ranking URLs

2. Keyword Parameter Analysis

This analysis considers the above SERP factors along with a close inspection of individual keywords. Each factor has a different weight, towards the likelihood of influencing the first-page ranking.

3. Calculation

In the third step, the KD score calculation formula also adapts for each nation, taking into consideration its population size and the number of websites.

Importance of KD score for SEO performance

The KD score calculation results provide the user with the KD rating and tell him what next he needs to do to achieve a good score. 

-> The scores of 0-14% are categorized as ‘very easy’, with the strongest likelihood of new pages appearing near the top Google rankings without the need for backlinks.

-> The scores of 15-29% are considered ‘easy’, with some competition, possibility to achieve higher ranking for the new web pages. But, this will require quality content based on the keywords.

-> When the score gets higher that is between 85-100%, it is considered ‘very hard’. Here keywords face the strongest competition and odds are stacked against new websites. In such a scenario, one can still hope for a ranking by using features such as on-page SEO, link building, pay-per-click advertising, and campaigns of content marketing. 

Conclusion

It may appear that integrating keyword difficulty scores into your keyword research can be a difficult task that requires so much consideration. You can make this task simple with a different approach in the keyword difficulty tool so you don’t have to manually look for a user’s intent and toss topics, keywords and categories.