Teutra/blog ” SEO ” Keywords: how to assess difficulty for ranking
How to assess the difficulty and choose the correct keywords for ranking on Google?
Let’s start by defining the meaning of the term keyword or in English, keyword.
“On the web, keywords allow the content of a web page to be associated with a user’s search (query) on a search engine and are often one of the main tools of SEO activities of optimization and positioning of web pages.” Source Okpedia
Assessing the difficulty of keywords in search is one of the most important aspects in the SEO optimization process of any web page.
There are various tools on the web such as Google Keyword Tool, Ahrefs or SEMrush that provide an assessment of keyword difficulty.
The assessment that each of these tools makes is based on proprietary algorithms but none of them has an exact formula since the correct assessment is formed by a mix of factors such as semantics, marketing, competition and optimization algorithms.
What does keyword difficulty consist of?
When an SEO consultant optimizes a website, he or she associates a keyword with each page.
To do this, the SEO consultant makes a list of possible keywords and assesses, for each of these keywords, how difficult it will be to bring the optimized page, to the first pages of search engines.
This assessment helps the SEO consultant determine, among other things, whether certain content should be produced.
As mentioned earlier, the difficulty in finding the best performing keywords is given by a mix of factors even if you look for the summary in numerical terms.
Software tools
Google Keyword Planning
The Google Keyword Planning Tool provides two important pieces of information: keyword search volume and competition.
This is important information because from the search volume it is possible to assess whether a particular keyword is actually being used by users or not.
As you can easily understand, it is useless to spend time and resources to optimize a web page for a keyword that is searched 10 times or less per month.
Competitive data allows us to understand how many companies are trying to rank one of their pages for a given keyword on search engines.
This is the other side of the coin. All your competitors are trying to optimize their pages for the same keywords, the ones most used by users.
It’s up to the professional to evaluate which of these it is most appropriate to fight with the competition for, and which keywords you can set an alternative long tail keyword strategy on.
“The expression long tail, in English The Long Tail, was coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 article in Wired Magazine to describe an economic and business model, used, for example, by Amazon.com and Netflix, in which revenues are earned not only by selling many units of a few items (the best sellers), but also by selling very few units of many different items.” Source Wikipedia.
It has to be said that the tool provided by Google takes into account metrics dedicated mainly to pay per click and therefore is useful, but within the mix of aspects to be considered.
Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer.
Ahrefs’ keyword difficulty calculation is based on backlinks and that is specifically, the number of domains pointing to each of the pages in Google’s top 10 results.
“An incoming link or backlink (English backlink, abbreviated as BL) is a hyperlink pointing to a particular web page. It is also called by the names incoming link, inbound link, inlink, or inward link.” Source Wikipedia
This allows you to estimate approximately, how many backlinks you need to rank on search engines for a given keyword.
But this algorithm does not take into account for example the relevance of the website or the relevance of the page to the keyword and last but not least, the weight, the value of the link.
Just to understand it if link is received from the Repubblica website it has much more weight than a link received from a local news site.
SEMrush
SEMrush is another tool, also for a fee, that primarily uses data from backlinks to determine keyword difficulty. The same argument made for Ahrefs applies.
I have written a guide for SEMrush, the link is below.
Related articles: The ultimate guide to SEMrush
The 3 factors that determine keyword difficulty for ranking
Several factors need to be combined to assess the true Google ranking difficulty of a keyword.
These factors affect the ranking when search engines show the search results page (SERP).
But what are these factors?
1.The content of the first two pages of Google’s search results.
2.The Intent of the user when performing a search.
3.Page and domain authority.
- The content of the first two Google pages.
Evaluating the content of the first 20 results of a search allows you to figure out fairly accurately, if you have a chance to place your page in the top 10.
The first page gives you information about which content generates the most traffic while the second page provides information about emerging content.
Analyze the content and determine its quality.
Is it written by a reliable author? Is it sufficiently in-depth? Is it a general topic article or does it focus on a specific aspect?
- Intent of the search engine user
For the success of a web page and when writing an article, it is important to have an idea of the type of content the user expects to find for a specific keyword.
The main intents of a Google search are to:
Buy
This is the search you perform when you intend to buy something.
For example, “tennis shoes” is a keyword closely related to business intent.
According to Google, the best way to satisfy the commercial intent of this search is to present the user with either an e-commerce site that sells shoes, or a site of a company that manufactures and sells shoes.
Inform
This is a search that is performed when a user is looking for information related to a specific product or service.
For example, the keyword “best tennis shoes” is a classic inform keyword.
In this case, Google prefers to show the user a blog article or a “ranking page” content page with a list of the best tennis shoes on the market.
- Popularity and authority of the domain and page
The third factor in determining the difficulty of ranking for a given keyword is the popularity and authority of the page and domain.
In other words, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1.How many backlinks and referring domains does each search results page receive?
2.How many backlinks and referring domains does each domain on the search results page receive?
3.What is the quality of these backlinks and referring domains for each page?
4.How related to the keyword are the backlinks for each page? (If we are analyzing the keyword “fountain pen,” how many links come from websites about “stationery and office products”?)
The first three questions can be answered with Ahrefs software, a toolbar that I highly recommend and that you can install for free as a simple Chrome extension.
It provides the number of backlinks, referring domains and domain rating, which represents the quality of links coming to a specific page and domain.
Combining page, domain link and authority data together with content analysis and search intent analysis is enough to assess the difficulty of ranking the chosen keyword on Google.
Conclusion
To rank on the first page on Google you must have a website that is extremely relevant to the search keyword, the content of the page must extremely relevant with the keyword, and numerous backlinks from quality domains.
The more you can meet the above criteria, the better chance you have of ranking on the first page on Google.
Inspired and freely translated from the following article: How to Determine SEO Keyword Difficulty and If You Should Optimize
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