Keyword Difficulty Explained (and How to Use It)

Keyword difficulty is a score — usually 0 to 100 — that estimates how hard it’ll be to rank on page one for a given keyword. It’s useful as a rough filter and dangerous as a gospel. Understanding what it really measures (and doesn’t) is the difference between using it well and being led around by it.

What difficulty is actually estimating

At its core, keyword difficulty is a proxy for how strong the pages already ranking are. Most tools compute it from signals like:

• The backlink profiles of the current top 10 results
• The domain authority of those ranking sites
• Sometimes on-page relevance and content depth

High score = the incumbents are strong and well-linked. Low score = the front page is weak, stale, or thin, and there’s room to slip in.

Notice what’s missing: intent and relevance to your site. Difficulty doesn’t know that you’re the perfect match for a query the current page only half-answers. It’s a measure of the competition’s strength, not your fit.

Why two tools give you two different numbers

Run the same keyword through three tools and you’ll get three scores. That’s not a bug — every tool uses its own backlink index and its own formula. Difficulty is a model, not a measurement. Treat any single score as directional, not absolute.

The practical takeaway: don’t agonize over a 34 vs. a 39. Do pay attention to the gap between a 30 and a 70.

How to read difficulty without overpaying for it

Difficulty scores are a paid feature on most platforms, and you don’t strictly need them to make good calls. You can approximate difficulty for free:

• Search the keyword and look at page one. Forums, ancient blog posts, or thin pages ranking = a winnable term. A wall of major brands = walk away (for now).
• Check the intent match. A page that only partially answers the query is beatable with a better one, whatever the “score.”
• Weigh it against your own authority. A difficulty of 40 is a wall for a week-old blog and a speed bump for an established site. The score is relative to you.

Difficulty is step two, not step one

Here’s the trap: people open a difficulty tool and start guessing keywords to check. That’s backwards. You can’t judge the difficulty of keywords you haven’t discovered yet — and the easy wins are almost always long-tail phrases you’d never think to type.

Discovery comes first. KeywordOrbit expands your seeds into the full long tail via Google Autocomplete, then pulls real search volume so you can rank by demand. From a complete, volume-sorted list, judging difficulty is a quick final pass — and the low-competition winners tend to announce themselves. The discovery method: long-tail keyword research.

The natural order:

1. Discover the full keyword landscape (don’t guess it).
2. Rank by volume — see free search volume.
3. Then judge difficulty on the shortlist that survived.

The point

Keyword difficulty is a helpful compass and a terrible captain. Use it to break ties on a shortlist you’ve already built — never to decide what to look for. The biggest, easiest wins are hiding in the long tail you haven’t discovered yet, and no difficulty score will find them for you.

Build the complete list first with KeywordOrbit — then difficulty is just the last, easy step.