What's the best way to manually evaluate a keyword difficulty?

senzu said:

It's something you'll pick up the more you do it and the longer you've done it. I only look at the first page and see if I think I'll have a chance against the top 3 for most keywords if I just want to quickly sort through keywords. If it's a big authority site and there are a ton of backlinks to that page, I move on. I look at their on-page and their off page. If the top ranking sites aren't giant authorities, they have weak backlinks, and they aren't targeting the keyword specifically in their on page then I mark it as a winner.

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In my opinion this is what I do and the best answer, it's all about site authority since Vincent's Change

I saw mention about PA, from the testing I've done don't waste your time

I look at the total page to see if the big sites are there
I use
less than 40 as easy
40-60 for medium need some links
anything over 60 good luck generally any site with 60 and higher is a large site

i use the tool to get a rough estimate.

then i check the top 3 results .... if you go for a small kw you have to rank there, if not you get no traffic anyway.
to analyse there page i use mystics. this gives you a idea if you should go for it or not ..... if it works ist not always sure. sometimes you think its easy and you don't rank ...

W9go said:

i use the tool to get a rough estimate.

then i check the top 3 results .... if you go for a small kw you have to rank there, if not you get no traffic anyway.
to analyse there page i use mystics. this gives you a idea if you should go for it or not ..... if it works ist not always sure. sometimes you think its easy and you don't rank ...

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I don't agree about small keywords
I get some of my best traffic from keywords Google show for little to no traffic

what many people fail to realize it is important to be everywhere, not just work on higher traffic keywords

here is an example what I mean


Gear Patrol gets over 1/2 million visitors monthly for organic search with approx the same amount of keywords it ranks for
it calculates out to about just over 1.08 visitors per keyword it ranks

I don't think all the keywords it ranks for are high traffic keywords

Most of the sites I see get between 1-3 visitors for every keyword in the big picture of things


point I am trying to make is rank for anything and everywhere, they are all touch points to anyone who finds your site

if you only focus on what you see as worth while traffic you are missing out on possible traffic
even if it only brings you one visitor that might convert

I dont really trust semrush difficulty store since its relatively new and their still getting the bugs out.

What I do is use longtail pro and semrush to find keywords with high views,
use longtail for their competitive score as a general tool to find a nice list of the ones I want to explore more,
get my list of keywords I think have potential order them out in terms of buying keywords and general info keywords
Put a personal value on which keywords have the best buyer intent giving them a rating 1-10 from myself
Use keyword revealer to look at each one and the 10 tep results to see whos ranking what their doing.

When I decided on a niche/keyword I like/love use majestic to find out what anchors top 3 competitors have and replicate, build my page

slicktimesavers said:

if you only focus on what you see as worth while traffic you are missing out on possible traffic
even if it only brings you one visitor that might convert

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Solid point and I couldn't agree more!

first 2 manually checks i look to : allintitle result , AVG PA for 10 competitors .....