Your Question is “What is Keyword Difficulty? How should we implement keywords and where can we implement keywords?” well, let’s discuss.
A keyword is a word that best describes or relates to the content on a website. This is a search term which one would want to rank for a certain page. When people search for the keyword or a phrase on a search engine, they find those keywords or related words on a website.
In other words, those keywords typed in the search query match with certain words published in the content of a website. This helps the search engine to produce appropriate search results which could relate a user’s search query to some relevant content on a website.
Search Engine Optimisation (Search Engine Optimisation) is an onerous, dynamic, competitive, and ongoing task. Keywords are one of the core features around which the work of SEO revolves.
Keyword difficulty aka SEO competition aka organic competition is a score that indicates how hard would it be to have a website rank high on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for that particular keyword.
A lot of factors determine whether our website would make it to the first page of a SERP. For example, factors like the popularity of our website (backlinks to the website concerned), the trust level of our domain name (domain authority), and the content placed on our website. Keyword Difficulty helps by providing a quick estimate on the relative level of difficulty a website would have to compete for a particular keyword.
Keyword Difficulty (KD) aka Organic Competition is a term used here, and to elaborate, organic here means the opposite of “paid”. Paid search appear advertisements at the top of SERP, they are labeled as “Ads”. In this case, organizations or companies pay Google and compete with other advertisers in an effort to make their web pages or ads to show up at top of SERP for specific keywords. In organic search, Google assumes the search results would satisfy a person’s query.
These “organic” websites don’t pay search engines or Google to appear as “Ads”. Google determines by the means of various algorithms and logic to rank these organic pages for particular searched keywords or phrases.
How is keyword difficulty determined?
Most of the keyword tools would have a KD score for each keyword. Each keyword tool uses its own criteria to assess such scores, so the scores might vary. Many factors are considered while calculating KD.
The following list tells us about the things which are factored in while determining the score for any particular keyword. This upcoming list is non-exhaustive and points to the prominent things for KD score calculation.
- Number of existing webpages that already target and rank high for a particular keyword.
- Of those existing webpages, the number of backlinks do they have. A backlinks a hyperlink from other websites to the website under scrutiny.
- For those existing webpages, how many backlinks does their website domain have?
- The trust level of those domains.
- The trust level of their top-level domains (TLD). For instance, ‘.edu’, ‘.gov’ is considered as very trusted TLDs.
- The quality and goodness of their content.
- The loading times and mobile-friendliness of such pages.
- Their performance in terms of user engagement.
The list doesn’t end here though.
How should we implement keywords and where can we implement keywords?
Selecting keywords is an art. No two keyword research campaigns can ever be the same. This is because the requirements of every industry, organization, or product and the associated campaigns are different.
Our goal, at the end, is to pick keywords that have relatively more traffic but brings in less competition. The selected keywords must be relevant to our campaign offers and aligned with its goals.
Only ranking high may not be enough. Satisfying users’ search intent is equally important. Otherwise, it might be possible though we may rank high, but would not be relevant to the user’s search intent or query.
This may bring in more traffic, but the conversion rate would be low and bounce rates might be high, hence yielding not much out of the efforts made for keyword research.
Keywords are as much about our audience as they are about our content. It might be possible that we may be offering the same thing to the people who might have searched about it with a slight difference in their words.
Therefore, it becomes imperative that we understand the need of the visitors (their intent behind a particular search query) to a website.
This can be achieved by understanding visitors’ needs – for the type of content they seek and what style they expect. This would help in creating content that would rank well organically and would drive visitors to our site.
There are various tools that can help us get a list of keywords. Such tools provide the facility of sorting keywords according to our relevance and above some expected score parameters which we might have set up. These tools have an intent filter where we can quickly hide the keywords where our offer does not satisfy what the user wanted with their search.
By understanding all the aforementioned things, we can implement keywords.
How to use keywords in posts?
Once, it was possible to add lots of keywords to our pages with the thing known as keyword stuffing. This ensured higher rankings. This practice made the content look unnatural, incoherent, and uninteresting to read. Also, Google has started to penalize such malpractices.
The content should be natural, coherent, well structured, easily readable, and written with the target audience in mind.
It should not be written to keep a search engine entirely. The keywords could be used in our content, but they should not be stuffed in almost every other line. With some latitude, keywords can constitute up to 3 % of our keywords. Don’t overdo the keywords.
It should be kept in mind that keywords are well distributed throughout our text. They need not be put in the first paragraph with some sort of optimization in mind.
Keywords should be placed at strategic places in the text, like at the beginning sentence of a paragraph or in the subheadings. This all has to be done by keeping the content length of the page.
Keywords could be used in the first paragraph, page title, and Meta description. This would make them more searchable and help search engines present a summary of our page in SERPs.
Choosing the right keywords and placing them carefully and tactfully, can make a lot of difference. SEO techniques are concerned with getting the right keywords in order to enhance a page’s ranking in SERP.
Choosing the right keywords and keywords research is a never-ending job, as the user preferences, intent and search words/phrases might vary. Therefore, through continuous efforts, only one can implement keywords to get the most benefit out of them.