What Is Keyword Difficulty? (& How to Measure It)

What Is Keyword Difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is a metric that measures how hard it would be to rank in Google’s top 10 organic (unpaid) results for a specific keyword.

It’s expressed as a percentage from 0 to 100—the higher the score, the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword.

In this article we’ll explore:

• Why keyword difficulty is important to understand
• What determines how difficult a keyword is
• How to find any keyword’s keyword difficulty score

And more.

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Why Is It Important to Understand Keyword Difficulty?

Understanding keyword difficulty can help you make informed decisions in the content planning and keyword research process of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts—the processes and techniques you use to boost visibility in search results.

If you only target keywords that are too difficult to rank for, you may waste time and resources without seeing any results.

But if you only target keywords that are too easy to rank for, you may miss out on more valuable traffic and conversions.

But keyword difficulty (KD%) can help you find the sweet spot between super competitive keywords (that are out of reach) and low-competition keywords (that don’t get any searches).

Like this:

In other words, KD% helps you pick the right keywords for your site—those that bring a good amount of organic traffic but don’t require too much effort.

Further reading:

What Determines How Difficult a...