We all have been using the same kind
of technique for keyword research and
writing articles for a very long time.
The problem is, what we’re doing
isn’t 100% effective and we still don’t know it.
Today I’m going to talk about a
special term called as Keyword Difficulty Analysis and how to use
Keyword Difficulty tool to ease our Keyword Research work.
Before that let me address, the
usual way of doing Keyword Research and why you’ve been doing it wrong all the
while.
- Keyword Research for High Volume, Low Competition and Good CPC Keyword.
- Search for effective LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords.
- Write articles with keyword in Title, URL, Meta Description, Image Alt Tags, Set Keyword Density to over 1% and sprinkle some LSI keywords.
- Share article on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and every other popular social network.
- Initiate proper interlinking, build backlinks via dofollow comments, Guest Post and other personalized techniques.
- Later pray for article to rank.
If you were doing what I mentioned
above and wish your article to somehow rank on Page 1 of Google, then let me
tell you my friend, all you have been doing ever since is taking a shot on a
foggy day.
Even if you did rank and later call
yourself a pro-blogger by applying above mentioned steps, you have been doing
it all wrong ever since.
Why?
Because…
You have been missing a very crucial
step in start of your Keyword Research.
That crucial step is Keyword
Difficulty Analysis!
What
does Keyword Difficulty Analysis mean?
Keyword Difficulty takes into account number of things like;
- How many pages are currently ranking for a Particular Keyword?
- How many pages are Bidding in that Keyword in Paid Search (PPC Campaign)?
- How expensive are the clicks? and volume for that term in a month.
In layman’s term, Keyword Difficulty
means…
“It is a factor that tells us how
easy or difficult it is to rank for a particular keyword.”
For example if you’re trying to rank
for keyword like ‘best dog food for chihuahua in Arizona’ then even with
couple of internal links you’ll be able to rank as its highly personalized and
local search.
But
What if? You’re trying to rank for
keyword like ‘nike running shoes’
It will be very difficult, because
most places will taken up by ecommerce sites and high authority blogs which
have either reviewed or promoting ‘nike running shoes.’
And when it comes to normal blogs
like yours and mine, it would to tough even to book a place in 5th page, isn’t
it?
Don’t worry as I will be teaching
you how to find keyword difficulty, how to use keyword difficulty tool to do it
effectively and never waste your efforts to rank a keyword.
Before that it’s important to know
what Strong Results and Weak Results mean.
Consider if you’re in tech niche,
you search for ‘iPhone 6 Review’; it’s very obvious that the first 10
results will be taken up high authoritative blogs which are very hard to
compete with.
If sites like Wikipedia, Wikihow,
Mashable, Techcrunch, Engadget, Macrumors and other established tech sites rank
in Top 10, then you should get a hint that it will be very hard to outrank
these sites.
Such type of SERP results are called
as Strong Results and it’s very hard to compete with them.
Whereas if you search for a long
tail keyword as seen in image below and majority results are from forums,
amateur/unprofessional YouTube Videos, Yahoo Answers, Quora and similar
user-generated or non-relevant sites then it’s fairly easy to outrank them.
The content on these sites is
user-generated which usually Google sees as having less authority and trust
factor are called as Weak Results.
Now that we’ve talked in brief about
Strong & Weak Results and Keyword Difficulty, let us now get into the
science of Keyword Difficulty analysis.
I’ve cropped Keyword Difficulty
Analysis using specialized Keyword Difficulty tool in three different methods.
Let’s Start!
Method
1 – Using Special Google Operators for Keyword Difficulty Analysis
For normal consumers and information
seekers Google is just a gateway or a simple input field where they type-in
queries and search for what they want.
For bloggers like us, it’s more than
just a search engine; it’s a powerful tool that helps us analyse our
competition.
Let us see how can we use Google as
a Keyword Difficulty tool and analyse competition to rank for a keyword.
Using Google Keyword Planner, I’ve taken a dummy
keyword which has fairly good amount of search, low competition and good CPC.
(When Google Keyword Planner shows
Low Competition for a keyword, then it usually regarding people advertising for
that keyword irrespective of organic results)
The keyword I’ve selected is ‘protein
rich food’ which has 8,100 monthly search, Low Competition and CPC for
$3.12.
Fire up your Chrome Browser in
Incognito Mode and go to Google.com.
(Incognito mode avoids returning
personalized results like News, Images, Youtube Videos, Ads and so on which
Google displays after collecting our search data and preferences. This helps us
get a generic ranking.)
Secondly open up an excel file or
Google Spreadsheet and create five columns.
Fill the columns as Keyword,
Total Results, Results with allinurl, Results with allintitle and lastly Results
with allintext. (Refer image below)
I’ll explain what these terms mean
just as we move on.
Now do a basic search (in incognito
mode) for the keyword ‘protein rich foods’ and write the total returned results
under ‘Total Results’ column in your spreadsheet.
Once you fill the first two column,
we’re now going to use special operators to make the best use of Google as a
Keyword Difficulty Tool. These special operators are
- allinurl – Displays all results with keyword appearing in URL.
- allintitle – Displays all results with keyword appearing in Title.
- allintext – Displays all results with keyword appearing inside the article.
Search now using these special
search operators one by one as shown below:
• ‘allinurl: protein rich foods’,
note the number of results containing ‘protein rich foods’ in URL and enter in
into the spreadsheet under ‘Results with allinurl’ column.
• ‘allintitle: protein rich
foods’, note the number of results containing ‘protein rich foods’ in Title
and enter it into the spreadsheet under ‘Results with allintitle’ column.
• ‘allintext: protein rich foods’, note the number of results containing ‘protein rich foods’ inside article and enter it into the spreadsheet under ‘Results with allintext’ column.
At the end your excel spreadsheet is
going to look something like this.
You can do the same with your
sub-keyword and LSI keywords.
What’s the purpose of our collected
data?
According to my experience, keywords
with than or nearby ‘Total Results’ of 1,000,000 has good possibility for
ranking on the 1st Page.
If ‘Results with allinurl’ and
‘Results with allintitle’ are less than or nearby 1000 then you have high
chances of ranking on the 1st page with a 2000+ words in-depth blog post,
proper image-optimization, High Flesch Reading Score (read point #4), Quick Load Speed, Good Social Shares, Efficient Inter Linking and
several high DA, PA Backlinks.
I’d suggest to not try for a keyword
where ‘Results with allintext’ is 50% more than the ‘Total Results’. In our
case the percentage is 460%, so it’s better to avoid working on this keyword.
To get more information regarding
sites that pull up in the Top 10 Results like Domain Authority, Page Authority,
Backlinks, PR, Domain Age and so on, I’d suggest you use a Chrome Extension
called as SEOQuake.
If you have doubts regarding this
technique, do leave a comment below in-case you don’t forget it later.
Moving on to next method i.e. the
second Keyword Difficulty Tool.
Method
2: Using a specialized Keyword Difficulty Checker
I usually prefer the first method as
I personally get to know the look and feel of my competition, visit the blog
posts and see what each author has to say about a particular topic.
But if you’re really isn’t that
patient let me introduce you to a true Keyword Difficulty tool called as Keyword Inspector.
Keyword Inspector is a free Keyword
Difficulty Analysis tool used to analyse difficulty in ranking a keyword.
It is a product of Learn2Rank.com
and does keyword difficulty analysis for you.
Once you create an account with
Learn2Rank and are logged into Keyword Inspector, follow the steps below to
make best use of this Keyword Difficulty Tool.
- Put your keyword in the input box (in our case ‘protein rich foods’) and select the country.
- Search results differ intensively depending on your country you’re targeting. Google usually ranks ecommerce sites, blogs, and websites within or closely related to that country.
- Once you’re done, click on Submit and let Keyword Inspector do rest of the work for you.
- In the screenshot below, Keyword Inspector shows that it is VERY DIFFICULT to rank for our chosen keyword, so it’s better to not even looking at it.
Keyword Inspector ranks keyword on a base of Very Easy, Easy, Moderate,
Difficult and Very Difficult.
As per my experience with this Keyword
Difficulty tool, I’d recommend to attempt for keywords with moderate and less
difficulty.
Keyword Inspector displays the Top
10 results ranking on Google for that keyword and displays average Links/Page,
average URL Pagerank, Average Moz Rank, Competition Score and Difficulty.
If your chosen keyword has score 40
and less then it will be easy to rank for it.
Do take this tool’s results with a
pinch of salt because for a keyword if it shows Very Difficult to Rank in USA,
might show Very Easy to rank in India due to different demography and people’s
needs.
If you have any questions or doubts
regarding this Keyword Difficulty Tool then leave a comment below before you
forget and later continue reading ahead.
Moving on to Method 3…
Method
3: Keyword Difficulty tool for Mommy’s and Daddy’s as well as for Pro Digital
Marketers
Well if you don’t want to go the
extra distance for Keyword Difficulty Analysis or supposedly not interested in
knowing the extra details.
In short if you’re SEO noob who’s a
house-wife mommy or a corporate tie-hauling worker and just don’t need the
hangover of huge details of SEO mumbo-jumbo required to rank a keyword, if you
don’t have the time to check each and every keyword slowly and steadily and
just want to drop all your main keyword, sub keyword and LSI keywords and do
Keyword Difficulty Analysis, this next tool is perfect for you.
The tool I’m talking about is a
professional SEO tool for digital marketers called as SEMrush.
SEMRUSH recently introduced a new
Keyword Difficulty Tool to bulk check difficulty in ranking multiple keywords.
Once you’re registered into SEMRUSH
using its 14-day FREE Trial Period, see
the Left Panel in SEMRUSH dashboard and look for Tools.
Under Tools you’ll have Keyword
Difficulty Tool.
Click on it and you can enter
maximum of 100 keywords per line and search their Keyword Difficulty.
The tool will display your difficulty
in ranking a keyword and grade it based on percentage.
In our case, the keyword we’ve
chosen has monthly volume of 8,100 and 85% Difficulty which means the keyword
is very hard to rank.
In SEMRUSH Keyword Difficulty tool,
keywords which have 60% or less competition can be ranked for 1st page of
Google.
If you’re a Professional Digital
Marketer or an Amateur Blogger, I’d recommend you using SEMrush as it is a Swiss Army Knife for Bloggers,
Internet and Affiliate Marketer.
It helps me do 4-jobs-in-1 i.e. find
Keyword Difficulty, Keyword Research, Competitors Analysis and helps finding
Backlink Opportunities. You may want to read complete SEMrush review.
If you really want to save the
trouble from jumping one tool to another for your SEO needs, SEMRUSH is just
for you.
I believe this 3rd Method isn’t as
complicated as the above two. Still if you have any doubts regarding this tool,
do let me know in the comments section.
I believe I was able to put forward
a very new and exciting topic in front of you.
Finding Keyword Difficulty for your
potential keywords you want to rank for helps you determine which keyword can
be actually ranked if you’re a normal blogger just like me.
I do have invested a lot of time to
put forth an informative and detailed post in front of you, so even if you did
understood everything, I’d request you to leave a comment below regarding the
article.
Let me know if you use some other
techniques different or similar than mine for analyzing competition for your
potential keywords.
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