How to Determine Your Chances of Ranking in Google
Finding some keywords that you want to rank for is easy. The hard part is figuring out what it takes to rank for those keywords (i.e. “keyword difficulty”) and then using that information to prioritize and plan your SEO strategy…
No one knows exactly what formula Google uses to rank web pages. Even if they did, it wouldn’t change the fact that some keywords are harder to rank for than others. That’s what makes the concept of “keyword difficulty” one of the most important challenges in SEO.
Now, some of you may be aware that we have a metric called Keyword Difficulty that thousands of SEO professionals rely on when conducting keyword research.
But at the same time, we've discovered that many users expect way too much from this statistic.
Most SEO professionals assess the “difficulty” of a keyword by analyzing the pages already ranking in Google for known factors that correlate with rankings.
This basically comes down to 4 main attributes:
- Page content
- Finder layout
- Links from other websites
- Domain / website authority
Most keyword research articles tell you to avoid keywords with high difficulty in favor of keywords with high search volumes and low Keyword Difficulty scores.
That makes perfect sense. But the reality is that the number of such keywords in a given niche is incredibly low. So once you fail to find them, you can conclude that keyword research simply isn’t working for you.
That's the wrong attitude.
Keyword difficulty is not meant to discourage you from ranking for a particular keyword. It is meant to help you estimate the resources needed to rank for it.
