About two-thirds of B2B marketers state strongly supported their info content marketing programs are much more effective or somewhat more effective than they were a year ago.

So what’s driving these remarkable content marketing success results? As this chart from Harvard Business School shows, the overall level of quality in marketing content is rising to levels well ahead of other online avenues, which have generally been lagging. The time spent on purposeful, documented posts from well-written, sharable ideas seeking engagement has jumped from 43% for external sites in 2013, to nearly two-thirds in 2017, and is expected to rise dramatically. Opening a channel to potential customers in a way that compels them to share their knowledge and experiences is showing a similar uptick in all areas.

And, without them really trying to do it, 46% of marketers have made the decision to be more time-efficient by using that same content strategy.

The knowledge to improve company marketing come from deeper understanding of keyword strategies, which can be reflected in targeted content strategies and greater ROI (Return on Investment).

Determining quality of search page has many aspects and is impossible to figure out by relying on one or two factors. Even so, common confusion regarding keyword difficulty and its uses arise. As the term implies, keyword difficulty value determines how difficult it is to produce high-quality website pages on the search engine results page (SERP). Easy keywords tend to be high volumes of incoming links as well as containing few redirects meaning it’s easy to find competing page rank. Low difficulty keywords, on the other hand, usually contain few incoming links as well as don’t produce impressions as similar easy keywords do.

What is Keyword Difficulty (KD) ?

Keyword difficulty measures how difficult it is to rank your site, usually a result of a small search volume vs. a large one.

Though the term “keyword difficulty” is now acknowledged by the industry, no one agency or tool would define it in the same way!

but even for Moz, it is bad to be completely consistent. For instance, coexistence of results returns under 1 vs. under 10 for Meta Rank .

Having a higher keyword difficulty level will make certain keyword tools and other techniques tougher to deal with. Further, it will make certain engines utterly complex, complex enough that taking into account the numerous factors would heavily tax the brain. Internal factors such as Internal links or Domain authority can be useless if you don’t know the external ones such as page Authority, Domain difficulty and content share.

Attaining difficult page ranking is achieved by having high domain authority or kd. The average score for leading site is around 60, while the toughest competition usually requires ratings of 80, while some types of website can actually get rankings of more than 1000 with this database.

Paid Vs. Organic Keywords

Classifying keyword difficulty as an organic metric is paramount, since many tools on the market use similar terminology that actually corresponds to paid search, not organic.

While an experienced marketer might be able to pick out the differences between them, a given tool’s interface may not make it perfectly clear as to what it is reporting: PPC difficulty or GSI/UBL.

SearchMetrics, for example, organizes “search volume” side by side with “CPC” in the same way horse products horse products in one metric metric. But in reality, CPC is not one of the most relevant keyword difficulty metrics.

PPC also defines the cost of a paid ad, and it measure the competitiveness of a keyword’s pay per click at a given price benchmark. In other words, this measure does measure keyword difficulty, just not within the organic realm

How To Measure Organic Keyword Difficulty?

You gotta have tools so you can really get down to the stuff.  What tools are available?

• Domain Authority.
• Page Authority.
• Number of referral domains.
• Content relevance to search query.
• Content depth of top-ranking results for a search query.

Some tools go beyond using just four core signals for keywords. Ahrefs, instead, focuses only on the backlink profiles of search result pages one through ten.

But on Google, 774 is considered pretty common. Supposedly, having a keyword that has at least 4 backlinks also converts better, while the ever-so-common 42 is effective.

So, generally people with Keyword Difficulty of 60 or less, will be able to publish it on the first page (10K) on some search engines like Google for between £10–16 per month advertising. But for anything above 60 difficulty, it is astronomically expensive to buy web page links; around £200 per month is approximately the upper limit of what web page backlinks can fetch.

The degree to which a ranking move may trigger a site to move up in the SERP will determine whether it’s an outright winner or a loser.

Moz uses a similar representation of Keyword Difficulty, but with improved indicators:

Keyword Difficulty Tools

SEO tools have been through many evolutions, from black-hat spam to Ph.D. formulas for basically the same problems. Nevertheless, those still out there report decent indices as well as a cost penny value as a share of In-the-Money-Per-Click.

Other than emphasizing that you should determine what type of keyword research tool is best for you, keyword research report is noted for its greater relevance of keywords by semantic domain.

Organic

Semrush: Offers keyphrase analysis tools including social and competitor analysis.

Moz Keyword Explorer: A free app just released can deliver competitive product suggestions for a better search engine optimization.

Ahrefs: This keyword research tool includes competitor and industry analysis functions to further enhance online marketing by promoting hard work through comparing competitors and assessing your competition’s worth.

PPC

SearchMetrics: The ultimate paid keyword performance tracking software is able to deliver a customized view of keyword data that can help companies target their audiences better.

Google Keyword Planner: Google keyword tools is free to use and helps you discover related keywords tied to your initial choices; all you need to do is input your search terms.

Importance Of Keyword Difficulty

Keyword research can allow you to design and benchmark your content strategy.

If you want to show content marketing ROI, it starts with keyword research.

By monitoring keywords’ performance in the rankings, success is easy to determine. With KP metrics, different types of content can be created, that lead to better rankings. By monitoring the performance of the specific keyword in terms of sales and backlinks, you can do well in online marketing.

When it comes to keyword difficulty, there are billions of searches being conducted every day, it is important for us to test the difficulty of the target keywords against volume, your domain’s authority and intent.

There are really three types of those intent that different people can have, and their score means different things. It’s hence imperative that you use keywords that refer to those types very clearly in your content strategy as each purpose wishes to use those types of material as keywords for its searches.

• Informational: A searcher is looking for information, with no clear motive beyond that.
• Navigational: Searcher is looking for a specific page or site, and only one page or site matches the search query.
• Transactional/Commercial: Searchers are looking to interact with a site via downloading an asset, signing up for an event or making a purchase.

Informational Vs. Commercial Intent Keywords

While product navigational keywords are very direct, current iterations of informational keywords and commercial intent keywords are more sophisticated, and the use of both in your SEO strategy is recommended.

Those educational and thought-leadership content may have common keywords. Often, these are exactly the keywords people are looking for. The great thing about meaningful keywords is that you need not follow specific techniques in order to get your traffic.

Though the path to purchase for informational keywords is not particularly short and direct, your brand will become an authority simply with relatively high search volume.

You need to have clear expectations about your blog content. With effective content, you can gradually build an audience on the majority of your blog posts. You should mainly focus on how-to and informational articles.

Naturally, there’s a link between the actual commercial intent that a firm has for a keyword and its official position rankings in Google or other search engines.

whereas the bad keywords could be harmful to your search engine visibility, you can select the valuable phrase in this article. The keywords in this post is valuable to SEO which happens when someone is close to finding your website when they type in that keyword into their browsers.

An ideal place to find product keyword ideas of your commercial intent is your landing page or product page. These are focused on the specific products that people are thinking of making a purchase for.

Trust can be built as a result of previously gaining awareness through encouraging recommendations online as the foundation of business reputation as an institution, and by linking the customer perception of habitual trust with their expectation consistency regarding key company features and quality.

Importance Of Intent-Driven Keywords

Graphical form provides an excellent string comparison tool to help you manage your risk properly.

• High search volume = high KD.
• Low search volume = low KD.

Although there are many shades of gray that exist along the spectrum of search term difficulty, dependent on the tool you’re using, there may be numerous medium-difficult terms that warrant targeting.

Finsbury Media is a publisher that publishes articles about social media and trends in the internet industry each month. And while a term like “content marketing” will get 300,000 hits a month on a “natural” spin on a keyword, many articles with keywords like this are due to be abandoned due to user findability concerns.

If a keyword in a SERP in a low search volume, then the search results need to be hyper-specific and with few occurrences in specialized data. And if a keyword in a SERP in a high search volume, then searchers need to be presented with more text and data from wide variety of industries.

• Is this a content creation agency?
• Is this located in London?
• Is this specific to blogs?

If users cannot find your site based on search engine criteria, you’re not going to click the link and look at the website. In this sense, low search volume prevents visitors and viewers from accessing and looking at your website.

If somebody lands on Finsbury Media page after searching “content creation agencies in London for blogs,” I know it very well that the searcher’s current intent is to put their content into cyberspace. Online.

Since this term doesn’t yet exist in the search data from Moz, I may use knowledge from this query for making a future business deal. Since it has a low KD, I should own the keyword to better measure it later.

That’s why intent-driven keywords matter, and it’s all the better that high-intent, low-volume keywords tend also to have KD scores that are low enough for brands to target with the potential to generate real results.

Long-Tail Keywords

In the keyword content equation, one element is how long a search query, or its match, is. “Content marketing” is much different from “content creation agencies in London for blogs.”

The more words you enter into a search bar, the more intent a user brings to the table. These searches tend to be between 4-6 words long, providing you with an opportunity to understand where your prospects are coming from and what they seek to find.

During your analysis of keyword difficulty, if long-tail common keywords aren’t already included as part of your process, then include them as well.

Keyword Difficulty Analysis

In a SERP analysis, a snapshot of playing field. If you evaluate top-performing content on page one or page two, you get an idea about the reasons why certain pages appear higher in search engine’s SERPs.

By looking at the first pages of page one on SERPs, you can gain better recognition of why certain pages can be ranked on first.

On a search engine optimisation (SEO) analysis on an examination of a precise page example on ranking, we can answer the following questions:

• What is the DOMA/PA of a webpage?
• How many links does this page have?
• How many referring domains does this webpage has?
• What keywords were applied as meta descriptions and as text to the body of the webpage?
• What on-page SEO elements were applied?

Moz even has a Chrome extension that does this automatically within SERPs: Moz Screenshot Runner

These metrics quickly helps evaluate whether the given keyword even worth pursuing.

Improving Your Keywords & Ranking

SERP crowding deals with how much noise can be seen on top results, which deals with how much visual clutter could be seen on the first page of SERPs. By noise we mean any visual distraction from traditional quality listings.

It’s not enough to just target a keyword and build content around it and expect your brand to appear in the top positions in SERP. There is also mastery of the various factors that make up Rank, including ranking factors and crowding factors.

If you don’t get your keywords in the organic search results within organic time for this, then you are likely to lose that keyword AND to gain the top three or, even one or two of them or, even to gain at lease one or two of them.

In tandem with KD, crowd analytics can also be used so evaluate how your keywords backlink performance is. What we have show is a visualization of how your competitors appear on a leaderboard.

Finding the best keyphrase for your consumer is difficult. Unless you are educated on marketing terms, it can be extremely difficult to measure the keyword difficulty of keywords.

Get in touch with our digital marketing agency for help with your paid and organic keyword ranking! We can help you improve your search ranking, drive relevant traffic and boost sales!