Keyword analysis - error with difficulty %

[PTech-188583]

Hello everyone!

Edge of all, I like and I use very often the "Keyword analysis" tool . However, recently, I have some difficulty to rely on the difficulty % of the keywords I've added. As an example I entered as keywords for a french speaking client, words with a geographical reference. It gives me a percentage too high because I am almost convinced that it would probably not be difficult to work with.

My question is: is there any known errors with keywords georeferenced French (google canada - english) and also what to trust when I want proof of the difficulty of a keyword in case of some errors may occur in the tool.

[Bryan_Loconto]

The tool calculates the top 10 pages mozrank/moztrust and creates a % average. I am not sure if SEOmoz indexes pages in france.

I like to manually look at the SERP and see who is ranking and try to figure out why. This gives me a good idea of how challenging the project will be,.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hi There,

Thanks for writing in. We do index French pages and the tool uses domain and page authority plus the mozrank/moztrust of the top 10 results to create a difficulty score on an algorithmic scale. When you run a report in the Keyword Difficulty tool, we provide the authority information for the top 10 pages. If you let me know the keyword you are looking at, I can take a look at the top 10 results and let you know if the percentage seems accurate.

-Chiaryn

[PTech-188583]

First of all, thank you for your help

My keywords are :

• clinique visuelle chibougamau

• ajustement verres de contact chibougamau

• clinique d'optométrie roberval

These three words all finishes by a word that is the city (and its a VERY small city) so im not sure that the difficulty % is really around 45%

I've selected Google Canada - French

[ChiarynMiranda]

Thanks for following up with me. As I mentioned, the keyword difficulty score is actually based primarily on the websites that are already ranking for the site and how hard it would be to knock those pages out of the top 10 results. If the pages ranking for that keyword, even if the search volume for that keyword is low, it would be difficult to beat the pages that are already ranking.

For example, the keyword "clinique visuelle chibougamau" is considered to be a competitve keyword because there are several sites ranking for that keyword that have a very high domain authority (http://screencast.com/t/Y1SiElwUbGd) and several that have a moderately high domain authority (http://screencast.com/t/vtIlKWyLT), so it would be very difficult to push those pages out of the rankings because powerful sites tend to dominate these results and links in quantity and quality (at both the domain and page level) are required to earn top ranking to push those site out of the rankings.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn