Keyword difficulty is a metric that marketers and SEO experts can use to determine the relative competition of a keyword. Using a metric such as this helps you determine if a particular keyword is worth your time and resources.

It’s important to understand that keyword difficulty is not the same thing as Google’s “competition” rating. While the competition metric is an interesting statistic, it doesn’t reflect the difficulty of ranking a keyword organically.

If you want to measure keyword difficulty, you’ll want to look at several factors. One of the best metrics is the number of backlinks. This is because quality backlinks tell search engines that your page is trustworthy.

Another metric to measure is the Citation Flow metric. This will tell you how popular a URL is. The number of referring domains is also an indicator.

Finally, you can measure the number of people who perform a search on your target keyword. This statistic isn’t necessarily the most accurate, but it does provide you with some information.

The number of sites that target your target keyword is another metric to look into. The more websites you have competing for the same keyword, the more difficult it will be for you to rank.

To find out more about keyword difficulty, try using a free tool such as Moz’s domain authority checker. Simply input a few URLs into the tool and it will display you your domain’s DA.

Some tools can filter by range. This is a great way to pick the highest difficulty ranking keywords and then focus your efforts on them.