How Hard Is It to Rank for Your Desired Keyword? You Can Now Find Out With Serpstat Keyword Difficulty Tool

Since we have more countries with available KD metric, we decided to remind you of its features :)

Keyword difficulty (hereinafter "KD") is a metric designed to give you an idea of how difficult the given keyword is to rank for. Focus on potential traffic you can easily achieve instead of chasing high-volume and high-competition keywords.

Keyword difficulty (KD) reflects the level of competition for a keyword in an organic search. Instead of wasting time tracking down highly competitive keywords that are difficult to rank for, focus on keywords that are guaranteed to bring a lot of traffic to your site. The indicator is calculated for the following Google databases:

• Ukraine
• USA
• Russia
• Great Britain
• Sweden
• Canada
• Australia
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Kazakhstan
• Mexico
• Bulgaria
• Belarus
• Japan
• Latvia
• India

But for other countries, the information is updated and pulled up as the Difficulty is calculated, and where you see N/A now, the KD value will appear. I am going to explain how this indicator works below.

There are two common ways to calculate KD:

Within the first method, KD is an average value of the number of backlinks every domain in top 10 has. The main disadvantage here is that the entire domain is analyzed instead of a specific page. Thus if some not influential and not relevant page of such trustworthy domain as Wikipedia or Amazon, e.x. is in top-10 of Google SERP, the KD for this keyword will increase.

The second method is based on the number of backlinks every page in top 10 has, where KD is an average value. Sure, backlinks are the crucial ranking factor, but not the only one. That's why this method cannot be considered as a perfect one.

Most services calculate the KD based on how many backlinks in the top 10 of SERP websites have. That is, basically, makes Keywords difficulty relying on the number of referring domains and high rated by authority backlinks from competitors.

We have developed a new algorithm that still contains backlinks, but not only them. The "new difficulty" takes into account other parameters:

• how often a specific URL from the top is at the analyzed top of SERP for other keywords;
• what type of keywords these are (commercial or non-commercial);
• other parameters related to the page itself.

First, we calculate the difficulty of the page, and then we calculate the difficulty of the keyword.

For example, we began to take into account the "complexity of the URL," ranked by the purposeful keyword, i.e., how many keywords a page in the top 10 ranks for. If there are URLs at the top that have only a few keywords, then the top for this request is not competitive.

We also take into account the type of keyword – whether it is commercial or not. When calculating, we use special coefficients to calculate the "commerciality" of the request.

In total, our algorithm is based on a formula of three indicators:

• number of backlinks;
• URL complexity;
• "commercial/noncommercial" types of requests.

We took 2 sample groups of keywords (simple and difficult) and manually evaluated level of competition for them. Using machine learning, we assorted the best coefficients that give the most accurate results and match our samples. After that, we took other samples to test the gained results.

To get the KD for the desired keyword, please use Serpstat's keyword difficulty tool search bar, and on the overview page you'll see the new KD metric:

To see detailed info, go to Keyword Selection feature and click on the arrow at Keyword Difficulty column.

On the graph below, the ratio of the number of of the high difficulty SEO keywords to low difficulty ones is displayed. As you see, there are much more simple and low-competition keywords in our database, which is quite logically (the same works with long-tail keywords).

Here are some examples of the most difficult keywords and easiest keywords:

Here is a great video to help you learn more about Keyword Difficulty and tracking keyword ranking:

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