What is Keyword Difficulty and How to Rank in Organic Search Results

Keyword difficulty is also known as keyword competition. It is the process to determine the difficulty level of certain words to rank in organic search results in Google. The variables that affect this process are domain authority, content quality, and page authority.

Why is keyword difficulty significant?

It is part of the keyword research process and is a vital part of it. This event helps you to select the best keywords for SEO. Keep in mind that each research tool works differently, and it will bring you different results. Our advice? Go for the popular keyword research tools to help you out: SEMrush, keywordTool.io, Sistrix, MozBar, and ahrefs.

In order to reach keyword difficulty and rank in organic search results, you will need to download your favourite keyword research tool and use most of its features to help you analyse all the variables that count for keyword difficulty. In our case, we have chosen MozBar due to the complete number of features on their free option.

Step 1. Install a keyword research tool like MozBar that is free and easy to use. You can download it and install an extension to chrome.

Step 2. Now, you will see a MozBar analysis in the SERP about the first pages whenever you search. It is time to start your research on keyword difficulty.

Step 3. The next step is to see the Page Authority (PA). Look site’s domain authority and brand presence. A way to look for that is by checking the PA number in the MozBar SERP overlay. A high number is for pages that have the most medium and high volume keywords. Keep an eye on those that have low PA. Take those keywords, optimise correctly, and you will beat them in no time. 

Step 4. Referring domains. Backlinks are the links from third-party sources that point to your website. The more backlinks, the higher the pages tend to rank. The higher the number of referring domains, the higher the rankings. It is one of the most important signals to rank a website.

Step 5. Domain authority (DA): evaluating your competitions page is also part of the process. Use MozBar, and you will see the DA. When you assess keyword competition and the pages, you must evaluate as well the website competition.

If you want to see it in more detail, you can click on link analysis.

You need to find low PA and DA to consider keywords that can rank easily.

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Step 6. On-page SEO: Check for title tags of the pages on google, meaning the blue links in the search results. See how often the same word or variations of this one are displayed there. Use as reference the first two finds, which means they are ranking on a good on-page SEO.

Step 7. Analyse H1/H2 tag 

Select the page analysis icon to see in detail the URL and H1/H2 tag optimisation. If you see the keyword there, they did a good job; if not, just do yours and beat them with excellent optimisation. Also, if they use the keyword there, it is not a bad idea to consider what has been working for them to evaluate your competition.

In their case, they have excellent optimisation of H1/H2, URL, content, meta description, meta keyword, and title. When you execute a search for the main keyword, you find it everywhere.

Step 8. You can find lower keyword competition in the following type of website:

• Blogs
• eBay
• Pressrelease sites
• Yahoo! Answers

Step 9. Content quality – search mode

Search for the keyword in question and read the content. Do you find it there? How often? Is it in the right spot?

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