What is a Good Keyword Difficulty Score?

What is a Good Keyword Difficulty Score?

                                

Hey gang - we get this question a lot here at Moz, so I thought I'd take a stab at answering and offering some advice.

First--the simple, but frustrating answer--it depends. There's no single score that's always good or always bad. It all depends on your situation and what you're seeking to accomplish. Broadly speaking, a higher keyword difficulty score means it will be more difficult to compete with the already-ranking results, and a lower difficulty score means it's likely to be easier. But there are many variables.

Keyword Difficulty is based on the PA and DA scores of the results that rank in Google's top 10 for a given keyword, as well as several other factors (like how many homepages vs. internal pages appear, use of query terms in the results, and more). In general, scores roughly correspond to a weighted average of the PA of the top 10, and the other inputs (DA, homepages, query term use, etc) modify that weighted average.

The best way to think about a KW Difficulty score is as a predictor for the level of challenge an "average" website will have ranking for that keyword. But, there are many potential modifiers, caveats, and things to consider, including:

• If you're a very powerful, important site with loads of links and other strong ranking signals, chances are good you could more easily rank for higher KW Difficulty scoring keywords (even those in the 60s and 70s)
• Conversely, if your site is brand new or has few positive ranking signals, you may find that even lower difficulty keywords (those in the 20s or 30s) are pretty tough
• If you are attempting to rank for keywords far outside your areas of relevance and authority (e.g. if Moz.com tried to rank for "pizza recipes" or if SeriousEats.com tried to rank for "keyword research tactics") you'll likely find that it's much harder to rank, even if the KW Difficulty scores look achievable
• If you're comparing multiple keywords to target with content and SEO efforts, and they have similar volumes but one is vastly lower in KW Difficulty, it probably makes sense to target that one first. In many ways, KW Difficulty is designed for precisely this -- helping to better prioritize your keyword research list
• Because of the weighted average, the use of Google's top 10 results, and the fact that PA and DA are both on a logarithmic scale, there's very few scores in the 0-20 range, and very few in the 80-100 range. I personally think of scores in the 20-35 range as being quite low, 36-50 in the middle, 51-65 pretty tough, and 66-80 as very difficult (your own intuition may vary based on your experiences, and that's OK)
• When you target more and more difficult keywords, you generally need A) more external links to the page B) more domain authority C) more relevant content and D) higher user engagement and satisfaction with your content.
  

Hopefully, this will help you better understand and work with KW Difficulty scoring. Let me know if you've got feedback, or additional questions, and I'll jump in!