Keyword Difficulties.

[fasttrak]

Seen a few threads recently where people are asking which keyword tool to use, to choose and which is best or most accurate.

All these tools have trials, take them for a test drive, do your own testing and research. See which one(s) suit your needs and of course your budget.


Hope you found this useful.

Nicely done.

So, manual research is still the best?

Whichever tool you choose to use, it is a very good idea to manually check the SERPs to verify the scores given. You can see quite quickly from a manual check if it is worth going after. However, what @MisterF has shown you is that some tools are better or more accurate than others, so they can save you quite a bit of time and effort.

Choose wisely or pay the price.

 

[GTRZ]

I do prefer manual research but may I ask what is that kGR tool? is it the
Keyword Golden Ratio in mangools?

 

[Roger Marquez]

Summary...Don´t blindly trust any SEO tool KD score. Instead, do your own analysis breaking down the SERP focusing on key factors that will help you determine the chances of ranking in the top 10 of Google by targeting a particular keyword.

 

[MisterF]

I am sorry, but what conclusion did you reach into?

Is the keyword easy to rank or difficult or moderate. With too much data and different data, I fail to assume a conclusion. Obviously I am a newbie in this.

The point I was looking to make is too many people use 1 tool, see a low KD score and spend a lot of time and effort trying to rank for something that they will probably never rank for.

I use all the tools above ( except SEMrush, which I might subscribe to again ) as part of my research, plus 4 or 5 others.

You obviously are a sensei when it comes to KW research. Do you still outsource this or do it by yourself? Who are your fav providers for this type of work?
Any plans to write a kw research guide?

Thanks for this one

I enjoy doing this myself, so it's rare I'll outsource this, unless I'm really pushed for time.

There are plenty of guides on here already and to be honest I don't really have time to do another one.

I do prefer manual research but may I ask what is that kGR tool? is it the
Keyword Golden Ratio in mangools?

No, it's one called allintitle.co, the seller is/was on here and I was a beta tester for it.

Summary...Don´t blindly trust any SEO tool KD score. Instead, do your own analysis breaking down the SERP focusing on key factors that will help you determine the chances of ranking in the top 10 of Google by targeting a particular keyword.

Yup, you and @fasttrak hit the nail on the head.

 

[Mr Positive]

This proves I’m right not to trust ahrefs, but need to focus on kgr tools too

 

[Repulsor]

The point I was looking to make is too many people use 1 tool, see a low KD score and spend a lot of time and effort trying to rank for something that they will probably never rank for.

I use all the tools above ( except SEMrush, which I might subscribe to again ) as part of my research, plus 4 or 5 others.

Ok, I see.

So from a learning point of view, can I ask what would you conclude for the above keyword from all the results. Would you mind sharing?

 

[thescrrr]

Outsource the work.

It's fine picking a niche/topic, but if the keywords you are going after are going to be difficult to rank for, then you're kinda wasting your time.

Some people go for huge search numbers, without looking at the true competition numbers etc.

There's a whole bunch of search operators you can use.
This is a great article by Josh from Ahrefs.

That's a really useful article, thanks for sharing.

 

[fadihs]

To determine keyword difficulty, simply look at the ranking articles and how many backlinks they have. The less backlinks the easiest the keyword.

 

[Doctor Sleep]

When I'm looking for keywords first I'm checking ahrefs for backlinks on the first 10. After that I'm checking MOZ and Kw finder diff. If they have same kw difficulty or similar I'm going for it.

 

[ThaiDreamer]

I'm using KeywordRevealer and I'm happy with it.

I think that any tool you use, you still need to use your common sense before deciding to go with the keyword.

The KW difficulty score is just the initial indicator of whether I should dig deeper or just leave it.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Not only do they use different data but they'll all weight metrics differently to judge the competition. At best it's a way to filter down keywords at bulk but I have shit content ranking for terms these tools would consider difficult purely because it's all just authority pages spread on top.

Conversely, a tool might tell you a keyword is low competition because the SERPS are targeting a different term, but Google understands the intent more than just the keyphrase so you're actually looking at some pretty heavy competition.

I haven't used them for a long time now.

 

[Deleted member 657006]

I wonder if majestic gone down hill yet.

there numbers so bad against Moz.

 

[Roger Marquez]

I mostly use Ahrefs and, whenever doing keyword research, I´ve found keywords with a KD score of 35 to be actually easier to rank in Google´s first page than a keyword with a KD score of 10.

And this has happened to me with KWFinder as well.

This is because most SEO tools use a weighted average of the backlink profiles of the top 10 pages on the SERP.

The problem with this approach is that, if you have a couple of very high authoritative sites in the top 10 it will skew the KD score by making it a lot more difficult to what really is.

I´ve encounter keyword with a couple of very high DA/PA pages on positions 1, 2, and 5 but the rest of the SERP was actually pretty easy to outrank the current pages.

So, don´t take KD in a vacuum and make sure to conduct a more in-depth analysis of the SERP for any given keyword you´re looking to target.

This video from Nathan helped me a lot on how I should approach SERP analysis in order to determine a keyword's true difficulty.

 

[ThaiDreamer]

Fun fact: the two keywords I'm ranking for at #1 with a 4-month old site with basically no backlink profile, are showing up as medium difficulty keywords in KeywordRevealer (33/100 and 36/100).

I picked them as I had seen that basically no site was optimized for them in the TOP 10 and the only reason they were showing up as medium difficulty keywords was because the TOP 10 was polluted with HA domains (that's what Google does when it can't find any site covering the topic properly).

No keyword tool is perfect and none will replace human's common sense.

 

[Nolan Briggs]

There is always an ongoing debate on which keyword research tool to use and you made it quite clear with all these real time implementations. Obviously it is still going to depend on the needs of the person but this puts things in perspective. Although my personal favorite is KW but I will try the other ones too now. Thank you for this.

 

[popopdc]

Awesome guide, love the example. It seems like people often forget that a tool is just that—a tool—and isn’t always perfect

 

[dotc0m]

Great info, It's a puzzle sometimes trying to make sense of different stats and get a clear figure. With KW's I was missing out on the KGR component and how to use that as a unit of measure.

 

[avyatechnology]

To check keyword difficulties I use Ahref tool.

 

[StalwartVA]

Thanks Guru this is a great help!

 

[Hanzo_AA]

Nicely done.



Whichever tool you choose to use, it is a very good idea to manually check the SERPs to verify the scores given. You can see quite quickly from a manual check if it is worth going after. However, what @MisterF has shown you is that some tools are better or more accurate than others, so they can save you quite a bit of time and effort.

Choose wisely or pay the price.

Which of those tools is best in this case, in your opinion?