Quantifiable keyword difficulty factors

bernard

bernard

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Ahref keyword difficulty is of no use in my country, so I'm looking at factors that could hopefully be used in an actual algorithmic calculation of keyword difficulty.

Here are some factors I consider:

Average URL Rating (Ahref)
Average Domain Rating (Ahref)
Average Referring domains to page (Ahref)

Has forum result?
Has newspaper result?
Has results without keyword in title?
Has "used product" sites?
 
If you had a serpwoo account, you could use our Keyword Volatility, OCI metric, and other tools.
 
You should also consider:
  • Can my site acquire backlinks better than the sites that already rank? How so? If you have an advantage where people would want to link to you, it'll make it easier to get backlinks and, therefore, rank.
  • Can my site's offering be better than the competitor's? Same reasoning here. If you offer a better product, people will link to you and your site will rank.
The metrics and keyword usage can show you if the keyword is difficult to rank for or not but it doesn't matter. If I were you, look at the competitors in the niche and their SEO strategy and think if you can beat them with a better offering or strategy and then execute it.

Why should you listen to me? My site's a CitationFlow 66. Nike.com is also CitationFlow 66, if you want a comparison. To be honest, we don't even analyze the competition when targeting keywords. We just target the keywords.
 
The only correlations that mean squat are document volume by word, by phrase, by title.

You can do do some dynamic weighting adjustments for the sake of stack ranking labels but it’s mostly just personal preference.

The hard part is getting representative index’s.

You really only see those in non public tools for some reason. We’re going to be releasing a free common crawl based one shortly cuz fuck all these shitty rent seekers trying to charge out of the ass for basic stuff and pretend nonsense scores.
 
Philip J. Fry said:
You should also consider:
  1. Can my site acquire backlinks better than the sites that already rank? How so? If you have an advantage where people would want to link to you, it'll make it easier to get backlinks and, therefore, rank.
  2. Can my site's offering be better than the competitor's? Same reasoning here. If you offer a better product, people will link to you and your site will rank.
Click to expand...

Interesting point!

Can you provide examples for 1) & 2)?

Appreciate your reply!
 
Though Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty is probably one of the most accurate kw metrics on the market, it's still not that helpful.

In my opinion, keyword metrics are more useful for bulk kw analysis but may not give you accurate analysis on a granular level. KW metrics really don't say much about your ability to rank, past backlinks. Whether you can rank or not doesn't always depend on authority, sometimes it just comes down to the content.

Ahrefs Kw difficulty basically relies on counting referring domains, not on-page content, etc. So this metric is really a one-dimensional metric, and you should use it as such.

Even if rankings for a particular keyword will depend mostly on authority & backlinks, then I would still agree with taking Philip J. Fry's approach.

But sometimes, you can outrank with the content alone. With lots of topics, you can create much better content that outranks higher authority competitors. So in these cases, typical KW metrics aren't telling you the full story.

Can you write better content? Can you add more value? Do the top-ranking pages answer all the questions (user intent), of a given kw? I like to manually look at keywords & sites ranking, so I can get a feel to see if I can outrank. It's really difficult to synthesize this type of process in an algorithm (without advanced AI or something)

Unfortunately, there isn't a kw tool that exists (that I have tried at least) that gives you the full story as far as a true keyword difficulty metric.
 
algospider said:
Interesting point!

Can you provide examples for 1) & 2)?

Appreciate your reply!
Click to expand...

With pleasure!

https://knifeup.com/knife-laws/

I was the one who created the site. I sold it back in 2014.

It's a knife review site. There's other knife review sites on the Internet but, when I realized that the Knife enthusiast community had a lot of questions about the legality of knives and there's no easy to read, definitive guide about knife law, I created that section of the site.

It quotes the law and gives a layman explanation of what the law is saying.

With a guide on the knife laws for all 50 states, people in the knife community would link to KnifeUp when they're discussing knife law.

If I were to explain it, you have to know who the target audience are, what their needs are, what products (and information and entertainment) are available to them, and what product/service/information you are capable of producing, that can be of use to them. Then you have to organize your resources, make the plan, execute the plan, monitor and evaluate the results, and refine the plan.

The plans are almost always custom to the site and audience. You can get inspiration from someone else's work (and you should) but you can't copy it and expect that it'll perform similarly for you. It probably won't and you'll probably waste your resources (unless you learned something, then it wasn't that bad).

In conclusion, before KnifeUp, the online knife community had only so many outlets. KnifeUp became a new place for them, so that they could find out the law. It added to the knife discussions online, which is a way in which it obtained backlinks.

It's just good art :wink:
 
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