Keyword Difficulty

A metric commonly used in search engine optimization that determines how much on-page targeting and offsite link building will be required to rank for a phrase. Also commonly referred to as KPI, most tools that monitor keyword difficulty use a percentage scale of 1-100, with phrases ranked in descending order. Therefore, a search phrase that requires more effort to obtain a top rank in the search engines – and therefore a high keyword difficulty – will typically receive a score that approaches 100 (or 1.00), whereas a search phrase that requires less effort to obtain a top rank will have a keyword difficulty that is closer to 0 (0.00).