Targeting proper keywords is as crucial to successfully operate a website as creating eye-catching images or coming up with a winning URL. To assess which keywords are or are not worth targeting, webmasters use various tools and techniques – by far the most popular the keyword difficulty score.
What is it, and why should you care about it?
Keyword difficulty is a rating that tells you how hard it would be to target a given keyword and optimize your webpage
- Try to use lowest-ranking keywords
- Competition is tough, and opponents may have better SEO teams
- A high-ranking keyword means more competitors are trying to rank for that word
- Ranking for a highly-rated keyword might be beneficial in the future, after you have built domain authority and your site appears in a decent position in the Google Search Results rankings
Keep user intent in mind
Target low-difficulty keywords that are also highly relevant to your chosen group of customers
- Understand your website’s audience and its needs – well enough to be pretty much convinced that you know what they are looking for, even if their intent is not exactly clear
Hub for difficult keywords
Create a hub page on your site to help organize and gather the necessary information which you will be able to offer users searching for a given high-rated keyword in the future.
- Fill the hub page with as many details as you can, and at the same time offer outbound links to other, more authoritative sources.
Settle for long-tail keywords
These have lower keyword difficulty, meaning it will be easier to rank for them.
- Until your website builds the necessary authority, it’ll be tough to just rank for popular, “hot” keywords. You can find success by ranking for the long tail keywords which contain higher-rated phrases within them.
Don’t forget other aspects of SEO
Other factors to take into account before deciding if a given keyword is worth targeting
- Is it worth targeting if the ROI is attractive enough and the potential conversion rate is satisfactory?
- Proper SEO optimization is a marathon; it will take time to unfold its full potential
Start with lower-volume options
Aim for keywords with difficulty scores lower than 50.
- Only try to rank for the higher-rated ones when you are sure the quality of the site content matches the quality offered by the websites typically targeting the big keywords
- It’s far better to achieve slow but steady growth than to completely disappear in the endless void of never-discovered locations.
