Free Keyword Difficulty Checker Tool — Pick Your Best Keywords

What is Keyword Difficulty score?

By definition, Rank Tracker's Keyword Difficulty metric shows how hard it's going to be to rank in top 10 results for any given keyword in Google or any localized versions of your target search engine.

The algorithm behind the Keyword SEO Difficulty value is dead simple. Basically, the keyword tool analyzes top 10 ranking pages for a certain keyword according to a wealth of important SEO metrics like:

InLink Rank

Domain InLink Rank

Sites referring to a page

Sites referring to a domain

How exactly Keyword Difficulty metric can help you

Check Keyword Difficulty to spot the best-performing queries

A competitive keyword with high ranking difficulty may take years to rank in organic search. Measure Keyword Difficulty scores in combination with Search Volume metrics, and you will find keywords that have the highest chances of bringing you tons of organic traffic and don't require much optimization effort to rank for. And of course, Rank Tracker is the best of free SEO tools for estimating your traffic potential.

How to

1. Open your project and move to Rank Tracking under the Target Keywords module.
2. Right-click the header of any column and add the Google Keyword Difficulty and # of Searches columns to your workspace.
3. Update the columns by clicking on the Update button and have a look at the stats.

Use the Keyword Difficulty metric for competition analysis

Keyword SEO Difficulty is the very first parameter to look at when comparing your pages to best-performing competitor domains. Now Rank Tracker lets you compare your top 10 ranking competitors' pages for every SEO keyword.

How to

1. Open your project and move to Rank Tracking.
2. Pick a keyword, switch to the Keyword Difficulty tab in the lower screen, and get SEO difficulty calculated by hitting the Update button .
3. Analyze keywords, splitting the stats by the local search engine and device, if necessary.

You will get an instant overview of the keyword competition, with domain authority for the ranking pages, and the strength of their link profile. Such domain rating estimates how much on-page and link building effort it will take to occupy a position amidst the top 10 ranking domains.

Estimate SEO Keyword Difficulty in bulk

If you've just collected a large number of new keyword suggestions and want to get an accurate Keyword Difficulty score for all of them in a bulk, there's good news for you. With Rank Tracker, you can check and compare the difficulty index of the whole keyword list. This feature is especially useful for those who carry out keyword research and have to deal with a large amount of data.

How to

1. In the Rank Tracking submodule, click on the Update SEO/PPC data button.
2. In the Update data for drop-down menu, select All keywords in workspace, check Keyword Difficulty, and hit OK. You will get the bulk score for the whole list of keywords.

Filter keywords by Keyword Difficulty score

Being an SEO, the last thing you probably want is to drown under a huge number of rubbishy keywords that have no chance to bring traffic to your site and are too hard to rank for. So the only right solution is to filter them with an appropriate SEO difficulty index, prioritizing keywords that have the potential to maximize your SEO results and can be worked on.

How to

1. In your workspace, click the funnel icon at the top right corner.
2. Click on Add filter and set your preferences to show the score for example Less than > 60.
3. Select all under Show results matching to see only the results that match your filtering conditions and hit OK.

Schedule Keyword Difficulty checks

With super fast-changing competition landscapes, Keyword Difficulty is the kind of metric that needs to be constantly monitored. The good news is, Rank Tracker can get your scores calculated (together with a number of other SEO stats in bulk) completely on autopilot. Note that the automated tasks are supported in the Enterprise version, but there is always a free trial to test it.

How to

1. In your project, move to Preferences > Scheduler.
2. Click on the Add button, mark Update keyword data, and hit Next.
3. Choose your site project, set the time and frequency of your checks, and name your scheduled task.