keyboard difficulty as a standalone
metric can be misleading I mean how can
a one two three digit number truly
quantify how hard is going to be to rank
in Google now despite its shortcomings
it's actually a super insightful metric
if you understand how it works and how
Google chooses which pages to rank so
today I'm gonna break down this
mysterious metric answer some frequently
asked questions and of course I'll show
you how to tell the difference between a
keyword trap and a keyword opportunity
stay tuned if you're unfamiliar with
keyword difficulty it's basically a
numerical representation of how hard
it'll be to rank in Google for a search
query now I want you to think about this
for a second Google uses hundreds of
ranking signals some that have been
confirmed some that have been verified
through third party studies and then
there are ones that SEO s have concluded
based on experience observation or gut
feelings so to expect a third party with
zero Association to Google to somehow
decrypt two hundred some-odd signals and
compute a quote/unquote accurate metric
it's unrealistic and perhaps impossible
after all most of these so-called
ranking factors are speculation and
there are others that can't even be
looked at independently and for that
reason you'll notice that key or
difficulty will differ depending on the
keyword research tool you're using in
fact I pulled up these three keywords in
four different keyword research tools
and you'll see how vastly different the
difficulty scores are so does that mean
that keyword difficulty is useless or
that one tool is better at predicting
ranking difficulty than another not at
all
now I can't speak on behalf of other
tools because a I don't know how they
calculate KT and B I don't really care
how they calculate it because HFS is the
only SEO tool with keyword difficulty
scores that i've used consistently for
the past five and a half years so I'll
be talking about how we calculate
keyword difficulty at HEV outline some
of the shortcomings for all tools
including ours and then we'll piece it
all together so you can find keyword
opportunities for your site so how does
hrs calculate keyword difficulty
simply put we take a weighted average of
the number of referring domains pointing
at the top 10 pages so this means that
if a keyword has a high KD then the
ranking pages likely have lots of Link's
pointing at them
in contrast locate a scores tell us that
the top ranking pages don't have many
links now since ranking for keywords
usually relies on backlinks KD acts as a
good proxy to ranking difficulty but
there are other factors we have to
consider so let's walk through these
factors and unpack them with practical
examples and I promise that by
understanding these fundamental concepts
it'll help you to utilize keyword
difficulty scores more effectively the
first thing to consider is search intent
search intent means the reason behind a
searchers quarry and generally speaking
these can be broken down into four
groups informational commercial
investigation navigational and
transactional informational queries are
ones where a searcher is looking for
information about a topic
these are usually queries that contain
words like how what and who so something
like what is protein powder will be
informational in nature commercial
investigation quarries are ones that
show that the searcher is in the market
for a specific product or service but
has yet to make a purchasing decision so
they're often looking for comparisons to
help solve their problem and these
queries often include key word modifiers
like best vs. and review so best protein
powder would be an example of this
navigational queries are when the
searcher is looking for a specific
website so a couple examples would be HS
keywords Explorer or Google Analytics
login finally our transactional queries
which indicate that the searcher is
looking to make a purchase so buy
protein powder would fit in this group
now keyword modifiers like the ones I've
mentioned won't always be in the quarry
so the way to identify search intent is
to look at the SERP for example looking
at the top 10 pages for the quarry
roasting coffee beans you'll see that
the top 10 pages are clearly
informational and we'll touch on this
again in a bit the second thing to
consider is website Authority at
HFS we have a metric called domain
rating which represents the overall
strength of a
sites backlink profile and while the
majority of SEO is believed that Google
uses some kind of domain level metric in
their ranking algorithm John Mueller has
publicly said they's don't now since our
keyword difficulty metric doesn't take
website Authority into account
interpreting KD will depend on what you
believe but for argument's sake let's
use some examples of Cory's with a low
difficulty score where the ranking pages
are from highly authoritative websites
so there are two things we need to talk
about here the first is brand equity
there are certain queries where big
brands dominate aserp and to be frank
there's not much you can do about it
unless you're in the same playing field
for example a transactional quarry like
media storage has a KD of 3 but if you
scroll down to the SERP you'll see that
they're dominated by household names
like Home Depot Amazon wave fare and
Walmart now quarries like these aren't
necessarily about page level links it
likely comes down to where people
actually shop in those places are
usually big brands so we're left with
this chicken or the egg scenario are
these sites ranking because of brand or
is it because of website Authority as we
measure using domain rating or could it
be expertise authoritative nough sand
trustworthiness aka eat what about CTR
or local factors maybe it's a
combination of many or are some of these
things dependent on the other and we
haven't even talked about on-page and
technical SEO factors like facets page
speed and more again this makes KD a
tough metric to calculate accurately
because manual assessment is a
prerequisite and even then we're still
hypothesizing now there are a lot of
transactional queries that look similar
to this especially for head terms so
when you see a similar SERP
you need to take Kady with a grain of
salt and assess all factors manually
case-by-case the second thing we need to
discuss is that keyword difficulty and
domain rating are relative metrics let's
take a look at an informational quarry
where brand equity may not play as big
of a role this query has a low KD but
looking at the SERP you'll see that all
the ranking pages have high domain
ratings aka high website Authority
so is this Katy's
core truly representative of ranking
difficulty the answer is yes and no
keyword difficulty is going to be
relative to the website you're trying to
rank so while the ranking domains mostly
have D are values in the 70's and 80's a
personal finance site with a dr 95 might
think acadia 5 is actually an
overestimation because they'd probably
be able to rank for this quarry with
ease
whereas a personal finance site with a
dr 15 would think it's too low and that
they've been duped by the difficulty
value now if you have a so-called weaker
site compared to these big brands don't
feel bad
pages on a low authority site can still
outperform high D our sites and that
usually comes down to the next
consideration which is the number of
quality links pointing at a page while
Katie takes into account the quantity of
links it doesn't account for quality to
assess quality it hasn't taken to
account topical relevance of the linking
domain and page the link authority from
the referring page the number of
external links on the referring page the
number of internal links pointing at the
referring page and the authority of
those pages so we keep things simple and
consistent by estimating the average
number of referring domains pointing at
the top 10 pages and we also provide an
estimate of the number of unique linking
domains you'll need in order to rank in
the top 10 so for that reason it's
always worth manually looking at the
backlink profiles of top ranking pages
because quantity isn't everything now
these are some of the reasons why no
tool can calculate KD accurately and as
I've mentioned before ranking difficulty
is relative based on the website you're
trying to rank and its competitors in
fact other things that I haven't even
touched on include content quality
technical factors like page speed in the
use of HTTP and user signals like dwell
time if that's even a ranking
consideration
so while keyword difficulty as a
standalone metric is far from perfect
there's actually a ton of utility you
can get from it when you use it based on
your understanding of the metric the
first way is to find low competition
topics based on search intent if you
remember before I showed you the example
of the transactional Corey media storage
came down to mostly brand on-page and
technical factors and while many
transactional quarries don't seem to
place as much weight on links
informational and commercial
investigation quarries often do which
happens to be what keyword difficulty is
built around so to find a reliable set
of low competition topics go to keywords
explorer and search for a broad quarry
related to your niche so I'll search for
makeup next I'll go to the questions
report which are all going to be
informational queries finally I'll set a
KD filter with a maximum value of five
assuming that's low in my books and now
you can see topics like how to sanitize
makeup and how to use a makeup sponge
and if I click the search button you'll
see that a it is indeed an informational
query be a couple of top ranking pages
don't have any links and see there's a
low authority website ranking in the top
ten now the questions report limits you
to queries that are phrased as questions
and as I've already shown not all
informational queries include words like
how what why where and when there are
additional keyword modifiers like
tutorial lists and ideas that imply a
need for information
so let's find more informational queries
by going to the phrase match report now
to narrow in on informational keywords
I'll click the include box and add a
list of informational keyword modifiers
and I'll change the tab to any word next
I'll set the KD filter again with a max
value of 5 and now we've just expanded
our list of queries where Katy should be
quite reliable as for commercial
investigation queries you can do the
exact same thing but instead of
informational modifiers you can use
words like best top price review and
more and you'll find that the keyword
difficulty scores here are pretty good
indicators of general ranking difficulty
but as always you'd have to analyze the
SERP to see who you'd be competing
against here's a list of informational
and commercial investigation modifiers
you can use so feel free to take a
screenshot and use them when you're
doing keyword research again K V is a
proxy to ranking difficult
so it's most effective when you're doing
keyword generation now two quick notes
first if you have a website in health or
wealth niches then you also need to
weigh in factors like eat as many of
these topics are in the your money or
your life category and second you should
always manually review the top-ranking
pages before creating your content
ignoring it is just lazy and can lead to
wasted time and money one final note I
want to make is not to shy away from
keywords with high difficulty scores
people often see a query with a high
difficulty score and immediately ignore
it
thinking they'll never rank but since
you know our keyword difficulty metric
is based purely around links then you
should look at this from a different
angle and see these high kV queries as
opportunities again high KD means that
on average the top ranking pages have
lots of links translation lots of link
prospects for you to find these topics
you just need to do the opposite of what
you did before instead of setting a max
KD value to something low set a minimum
KD value to something high so right now
I'm in the questions report since I'm
looking for informational queries on
credit cards so I'll set a minimum KD
value to 40 and you can now see some
great informational topics and if I
click on the cert button you'll see that
these pages have lots of backlinks where
you can reach out to the linking pages
and try to get them to link back to you
now targeting these high KD keywords
isn't necessarily about ranking for a
high traffic quarry by getting links to
your pages you can increase your overall
website Authority and you can funnel
PageRank through internal links to help
boost your other pages rankings and we
have a full tutorial on using this as an
SEO strategy which I'll link up in the
description now keyboard difficulty
isn't meant to discourage you from
ranking for a particular keyword its
purpose is to help you estimate the
resources required to rank for a query
and to give skimmable guidance with
keyword generation so if you still
expect keyword research tools to provide
an infallible keyword difficulty metric
then that needs to change
instead use what you know about your
preferred tools metric and combine it
with what you know about how goo
ranks pages now if you enjoyed this
video make sure to like share and
subscribe for more actionable SEO and
marketing tutorials and if you want a
more hands-on keyword research tutorial
then I recommend watching the ones that
I've linked up for you I'll see you in
the next tutorial
