Keyword Difficulty: How Do You Measure It? - Search Engine Journal

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Keyword difficulty is a metric used by SEO pros to help quantify how easy or hard it is to break into the search engine results.

It gives the SEO pros a way to gauge the level of effort needed to optimize for that search engine results page (SERP), which can further aid in SEO strategies when deciding which keywords to prioritize.

How Is Keyword Difficulty Measured?

Keyword difficulty can come in a variety of metrics from various tools.

In some cases, keyword difficulty is synonymous with keyword competition or competitiveness.

Or, you may hear some SEO professionals in the industry simply refer to it as competition or competitiveness.

Moz’s Keyword Difficulty

Probably the first company to actually use the term keyword difficulty (KD) was Moz within its own keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer.

Moz assigns a value from 1 to 100, where 100 is very difficult to rank for, and 1 would be very easy.

Moz does not share its specific proprietary formula on how it is computed, but the company does mention that it takes into account page authority (PA), domain authority (DA), and projected clickthrough rates (CTR).

PA and DA are also proprietary metrics by Moz that Google does not use.

These metrics are Moz’s attempt to assign a quality metric to serve as a proxy for Google’...

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