I checked the keyword difficulty for ‘minecraft steve’ and it shows 3/100 Easy. It says you’ll need backlinks from around 4 websites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword. I got the same result when trying ‘lego minecraft’. How is it this inaccurate?
Why rely on these metrics at all? Just look at the SERPs directly. Do you think your site has the authority to compete with the ones ranking there? That will give you a clearer picture.
Evan said:
Why rely on these metrics at all? Just look at the SERPs directly. Do you think your site has the authority to compete with the ones ranking there? That will give you a clearer picture.
Keyword tools are supposed to be helpful. Otherwise, why would they exist? You’d think a company charging so much and being so well-known would have a tool that works at least on a basic level.
@Dana
I didn’t say they’re completely useless. They can be helpful, but when it comes to keyword difficulty, they often miss the mark.
You might be expecting a lot from a free tool. To be fair, those keywords are hard for any tool to analyze well.
‘Lego Minecraft’ is going to have tons of product listings and ads.
‘Minecraft Steve’ probably has image-heavy results, products, and forum posts, which might make it look easier than it actually is.
@KeywordKaiserKara
They probably use the same data as their full Keywords Explorer, but with a limited interface for the free version. The issue is that keyword difficulty only looks at the number of backlinks for ranking pages and ignores other factors. For example, I checked ‘Minecraft Steve’ in Keywords Explorer, and most top-ranking URLs have hundreds of backlinks, but they show ‘n/a’ in the free tool. So the metric can be misleading.
I refreshed the SERP data in Ahrefs, and now it shows KD 4 in the US, estimating you need 5 backlinks. The free tool still shows KD 3 because its data is cached.
Keyword difficulty is a simple metric based only on the number of backlinks for ranking pages. It doesn’t consider other signals or how hard it would be for your specific site to rank. It’s useful for filtering big lists of keywords, but you shouldn’t rely on it alone to estimate how competitive a keyword is for you.