When keyword difficulty is used as a metric

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ord difficulty is used as a metric Almost every keyword research tool has a keyword difficulty score. These tools all use the same 0100 score, but each tool calculates it differently. If you check the difficulty of the same keyword in different SEO tools, the numbers will vary considerably: That’s why you need to understand how exactly the SEO tool you choose calculates ranking difficulty. Only then can you make an informed decision on this basis. At Ahrefs we use a simple method to calculate KD. We pull the top 10 ranking pages for your keyword and see how many sites link to those pages. The more links there are to the top-ranking pages for your keyword, the higher its KD score will be. This indicator is very simple and very actionable. Keyword Difficulty in Ahrefs is based on the number of top-ranking referring domains.

Use more factors to calculate keyword difficulty Many Ahrefs users have been asking CMS Web Designs us to consider more factors when calculating the KD indicator, such as: Domain Rating internal link content length Correlation etc. Okay, let's say we decide to include Domain Rating (DR) into our calculations. Here's what happens if we assume two keywords: Keyword #1 has pages from sites with DR greater than 80+ ranked in the top 10, but does not have any backlinks Keyword #2 comes from a website with DR less than 40. The page ranks in the top 10, and the page has more than 40 backlinks. Which of these keywords should have a higher KD? And how much higher? If you asked dozens of SEO people to manually score these two keywords on a scale from 0 to 100, their results would be very different. This is because each SEO will have a different weight distribution when mixing the weight of DR and the page’s backlinks into a KD score. Therefore, by adding just one extra variable (DR), we introduce a lot of controversy into the calculation of KD and make it rather unintuitive.



Hopefully this explains why we decided to keep our KD metric simple and straightforward, calculating it using only backlinks from top-ranking pages. That way, you know exactly what you're looking at when applying KD filtering to your keyword list. It gives you a direct benchmark of how many backlinks the top-ranking pages have for each keyword: KD 05 – Top ranking pages have almost no backlinks KD ~50 – Unprecedented ranking page with hundreds of backlinks KD 90+ – Top ranking pages have thousands of backlinks But backlinks aren’t the only ranking factor. If you want to properly measure your chances of ranking for a certain keyword, you need to go a step further and do a more thorough analysis of the SERP.