Keyword difficulty - benchmarks

[Walterman]

hi,

anyone know some good benchmarks? how many hours a certain keyword needs with what percentage? or how to really interpret the %?

thanks,

Walter

[randfish]

Hi Walter - I can help a little on that.

Basically, I'd urge you to think of thee percentages as good relative numbers that are most directly connected to Domain Authority and Page Authority scores. For example, say there's a keyword with a difficulty of 30%. You could roughly expect that to compete, you'd need to be in the Domain Authority and Page Authority 30(ish) range to get onto page 1 (and you'd need to be higher to be at the top). That's most certainly not all there is to it, but it's a reasonable rough way to think about it.

Hours needed is a metric I don't think is a good way to think about Keyword Difficulty. Some marketers and some sites may require 5 hours of work to create and market a piece of content that could compete for the same difficulty that it would take months or even years for another site to work on.

http://moz.com/academy/competition-keyword-analysis is a great resource you should check out and dives into detail on how to use the tool (including a bit about the percentages).

The way I always use keyword difficulty is to help identify the relative challenge in ranking for a term. My goal is to target terms with high search volume and low difficulty first and to recognize that really hard keywords are going to take much more outstanding content (and outstanding marketing to earn links). Some low difficulty terms (e.g. anything below 25 or 30) might just take good keyword targeting and hitting publish (because I have a pretty strong blog already). High difficulty terms (anything over 60 or 65) are usually going to take serious concerted effort and a lot of links (with some nice anchor text) to rank well.