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If you haven't already checked it out, see https://moz.com/blog/discovering-prioritizing-best-keywords-whiteboard-friday for the process I've been recommending to folks. Basically, I'd suggest looking outside just your competition, though that's certainly one of the types of research I'd use.

Thanks! Check out https://moz.com/blog/can-seos-stop-worrying-keywords-focus-topics-whiteboard-friday for more info on exactly that topic. Basically, I'd suggest targeting all the keywords that target the same searcher intent together on a page, and split up any that have different intent/search goals to different pages.

Hi - thanks! Glad to hear it. As far as accuracy in the UK - the SERP data is accurate, but volume is still US-centric until we make some updates. Those should be happening relatively soon (next few months).

As far as UK vs. GB, I believe the rankings can be slightly different.

Each keyword you add to a list does count toward the 300 limit (or whatever limit your account has). That's because for each, we need to do a SERP crawl to get the metrics and analysis.

If you upload a list with 100 keywords, we'll do a data fetch for each, and you'll have 200 queries remaining for the month.

Unfortuntately, we don't have this feature yet in KW Explorer, but you can get it at SEMRush, Spyfu, Keycompete, Searchmetrics, and others. We hope to have this ability in the future.

Hi Mark - yes! If you're using the New Zealand select in the drop down for engines, those other scores should be accurate.

Cheers!

Thanks @Chrwald - I'm going to ask Dr. Pete to take a look at these.

Hi Christian - can you send over some examples of Difficulty scores that were 40+ and are now <5. That seems very fishy and we can look into it.

In general, the new tool should be vastly more accurate and useful than the old one. Volume data in the old KW Difficulty tool comes from Grepwords, which we'll be using for non-US volume in the new tool as well, hopefully very soon, so you should see that fixed before the old KW Difficulty disappears.

Hi Anders - totally not your fault; it's ours. We have volume data that's US-centric currently, and don't have data for Norway (or other countries) yet. We're working first on UK, Canada, and Australia, and then will try to get other countries' search volume data, too.

Apologies for that - in the meantime, my suggestion is to use AdWords KW Planner data for volume and select the specific country.

Hi Gyorgy - I think you asked this same question in the reply to another thread, but I'll paste my answer to that below

Some important things to keep in mind about volume in KWE:

1. It uses United States volume only right now (if you search by default in AdWords, you may be getting global search volume unless you choose "US")

2. It's modifying that data with actual clickstream numbers to give greater accuracy

3. It normalizes trend volume, so if Google has a big spike or dip, they'll show that one number, whereas KWE tries to estimate the monthly average data.

Yeah - some important things to keep in mind about volume in KWE:

1. It uses United States volume only right now (if you search by default in AdWords, you may be getting global search volume unless you choose "US")

2. It's modifying that data with actual clickstream numbers to give greater accuracy

3. It normalizes trend volume, so if Google has a big spike or dip, they'll show that one number, whereas KWE tries to estimate the monthly average data.

Hi Gyorgy - you can use the old KW Difficulty tool, but the search volumes there aren't accurate for non-US either, and the difficulty scores are less accurate, too. I'd suggest using KW Explorer if you want all the other scores (those are accurate) and AdWords KW Planner in the meantime.

We're prioritizing UK, Canada, and Australia volume data very soon - hopefully will be in the product in the next 60 days.

Thanks Ian. I wanted to add on that we've got a little bit of strange issue with some domains in this index that may affect some sorting and link lists.

Basic story: We blacklist domains that have more than 10,000 subdomains and have other features that we've observed make them, almost always, webspam. Since they can adversely impact metrics and scores, we just don't include them in the index. The last 6 months, this process has gone really well, but this index, we hit a bug, and accidentally excluded ~750 domains that aren't all spam, including big ones like Etsy.com, Wikia.com, Blogspot.com, Quora.com, and others.

Initially, folks noticed because the PA/DA scores for these sites were all 1. That part has been fixed, and the metrics should now be more accurate. But, we don't have the link lists for these sites, and we don't have PA scores for the interior pages on these domains. As such, if you're sorting your link lists or if you're researching links that point to a page on Etsy.com or Blogspot.com or Wikia.com or a few others, you'll see no data. This will be fixed in our next index, but we couldn't fix it in this one. The bug was caught, but caught too late, and thus the next 28(ish) days will have some of these sorting and link list issues on these ~750 domains (of which, I estimate, only ~150 or so are actually legit sites - most of the others are, indeed, spam).

If you've got any additional questions I can answer about this, please let me know. Apologies for the error from me and from the team - we'll make sure to get this right in the future, and we've set up new kinds of tests to prevent any similar issues from going unnoticed.

Hi Kev - yeah, totally agree that we need to make that more clear. We'll get to work on that asap.

And yes - Potential takes into account whatever metrics it can; when those are absent (like volume), it uses a low volume bucket (I think 0-10) so as not to overstate. Often when we don't have volume, it's either a very new keyword or a very uncommon one.

And yeah - we don't cover the UK yet, but hope to in the future.

Yup - agree that Grepwords is the way to go here. http://grepwords.com/

Keyword Explorer supports only up to 500 keywords uploaded in a single list (and the keyword data is only for the US right now). Going piece by piece through AdWords is probably the only other path to take.

It will likely be a few months at least before we can broaden outside the US, and maybe some more before we get to non-English languages. Sorry about that! We will get there; just need to do a lot of work to make it happen.

Totally agree. We're looking at making it more integrated with OSE very soon. Thanks Gavo!

Hi Dan - yeah, I think what you're describing makes good sense. You can use the non-geo-specific term to get an idea of broad popularity and in most cases, you'll be able to rank well in your local geography (assuming Google thinks there's local intent) for the broader term with a page targeting the regional one.

e.g. If I search for Patent Attorneys from my office (which is in Seattle), Google biases to show me patent attorneys who are in Seattle. Very similar to the results I get if I search Seattle Patent Attorneys (though some variation is always present).

If my schedule allows it, I'd be happy to present. I typically fill up ~1 year in advance these days (crazy, I know), but if you have 2017 plans, hit me up! rand@moz.com.

Hi Stephen - certainly! There's actually a bunch of detail in the blog post, and Dr. Pete will be writing another post next week that includes more depth on how we calculate each metric and why we chose the algorithms/formulas that we did.

These metrics are somewhat new - Difficulty we obviously had before, but it's been upgraded and improved to be more accurate and have a better range. Opportunity is based off Dr. Pete's prototype tool from Mozcon last year. Importance is a user-modifiable score that we saw in almost everyone's Excel spreadsheets and thus, wanted to re-create in the app, and Potential is a wholly new combination of all the metrics to help you prioritize.