Keyword Difficulty and Analysis

[kirube]

Hi There -

I'm using MOZ's keyword difficulty and analysis tool to understand the difficulty of a given set of keywords.

To my surprise-

I appear number 1 on Google, for a keyword with a difficulty of 36%

On the other hand, for few other with difficulty in range 16% - 25%, I appear on the second or third page. In regards to page optimization, and back links i'm far better off on these ones than the other one (with 36%).

Any reason why that would be the case ?

PS: I've already analyzed the possibility of DA or PA, but it doesn't make sense. As the latter ones always scores better.

Thanks,

K

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy,

Different pages will rank differently for different things. Links are a big part of it, but Google uses over 200 different signals in varying degrees, so it's often hard to pinpoint the exact cause of why one page ranks higher than the other.

In this case, I'd choose to run a "full report" in the Keyword Difficulty Tool. As a PRO member you have a certain amount of credits to run a number of reports. Each report takes a few hours, and the system will email you when it is ready.

The "Full Report" goes way beyond links and also looks at on-page elments, social metrics and anchor text for the top 10 results of the SERP. When setting up the report, you can also add your own URL if it is not already on of the top 10.

Taking a broad look at many more signals aggregated in this way can often give you a better idea about why your competitor is ranking, and often leads to ideas about what you can do to catch up or improve.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!