SEO

How to Estimate Your Chances to Rank

Published

3 years ago

May 9, 2022

It’s easy to find keywords that can bring lots of traffic to your website. What’s harder is to predict your chances of ranking for them.

To help solve this problem, SEO tools like Ahrefs give keywords a “difficulty” score from 0 to 100.

But the truth is that these scores aren’t foolproof.

So in this post, I’m going to outline the benefits and shortcomings of the Keyword Difficulty metric, as well as break down what other things professional SEOs look at when estimating their chances to rank for a given keyword.

What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is an SEO metric that estimates how hard it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword. It is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the hardest to rank for.

Keywords Explorer overview of "best backpack," which has a KD of 42

However, when many SEO professionals use the term “keyword difficulty,” they’re referring to the broader concept of ranking difficulty—not a particular metric in a particular SEO tool.

Keyword difficulty as a metric

Almost every keyword research tool has a keyword difficulty score. These tools all use the same 0-100 scale, but each one calculates it differently.

If you check the keyword difficulty of the same keywords in different SEO tools, the numbers will vary quite substantially:

Table showing KD scores for various keywords vary for each tool

That is why it is important to understand how exactly the ranking difficulty is calculated by your SEO tool of choice. Only then can you make informed decisions based on it.

Here at Ahrefs, we use a simple method for calculating KD. We pull the top 10 ranking pages for your keyword and look up how many websites link to each of them. The more links the top-ranking pages for your keyword have, the higher its KD score. Very simple and very actionable.

Keyword Difficulty in Ahrefs is based on linking domains to top-ranking pages.

Using more factors for calculating Keyword Difficulty

Many SEOs who use Ahrefs have been asking us to consider more factors when calculating our KD metric:

Well, let’s say we decided to include Domain Rating (DR) in our calculation. Here’s what happens if we take two hypothetical keywords:

Keyword #1 – Has pages from DR 80+ websites ranking in the top 10, but none has any backlinks
Keyword #2 – Has pages from DR <40 websites in the top 10, but each of them has 40+ backlinks

Which of these keywords should have a higher KD? And by how much?

If you ask a few dozen SEOs to manually score these two keywords on a scale from 0 to 100, their estimates will be very different. That’s because each SEO professional will distribute the “weights” of DR and page-level backlinks differently when blending them into a single KD score.

So by adding just one additional variable (DR), we’re causing a great deal of controversy to the calculation of KD and making it quite unintuitive.

Hopefully, that explains why we decided to keep our KD metric super simple and only use the backlinks of the top-ranking pages to calculate it.

This way, you know exactly what you’re looking at when applying a KD filter to your list of keywords. It gives you a straightforward benchmark of how many backlinks the top-ranking pages for each keyword have:

KD 0-5 – Top-ranking pages barely have any backlinks
KD ~50 – Top-ranking pages have a couple of hundred backlinks
KD 90+ – Top-ranking pages have thousands of backlinks

But backlinks aren’t the only ranking factor. If you want to properly gauge your chances of ranking for a given keyword, you need to go further and do a more thorough analysis of the SERP.

Speaking of which…

Keyword difficulty as a concept

Nobody knows exactly how Google ranks pages. But we do know the main things that matter for ranking well. And by analyzing those “main things,” SEOs can get a pretty good idea of what it takes to rank on Google for a given keyword.

So here’s how they do it.

1. Figure out how many backlinks you’ll need

Backlinks act as votes, which tell Google that a given page is more valuable than any other page on the same topic. So, as a general rule, if you want to rank in the top 10 search results for a given keyword, you’ll have to acquire as many backlinks as the current top-ranking pages have (if not more).

In Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, we actually have a text hint right under our KD score that tells you an approximate number of backlinks you’ll need:

Keywords Explorer overview of "best backpack"; notably, there's a text hint below the KD score

Two important caveats here:

The hint says “to rank in the top 10,” which means that getting as many (or more) backlinks as your competitors won’t guarantee that you’ll rank #1. But there’s a very good chance that you’ll rank somewhere in the top 10.
The sheer quantity of backlinks can often be misleading because some backlinks cast a stronger vote than others. So this number is merely an estimation.

To properly estimate the strength of the backlink profiles of the top-ranking pages, you’ll have to review all their backlinks manually, i.e., do a backlink audit of these pages.

In Keywords Explorer, we’ve created a handy shortcut for this, since each number in the “SERP Overview” links to its respective backlink report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Click these numbers (in the highlighted columns) to manually review backlinks.

2. Review the “authority” of your competitors

Many SEOs believe that Google often gives preference to pages that belong to big, popular websites. So if there are lots of these on a SERP, they recommend you to stay away—unless your website is just as big and famous.

And while we don’t necessarily agree with such an assessment, we do think it may be quite useful to peek at how authoritative the top-ranking websites are.

Do you pay attention to Domain Rating (or any other “website authority” metric) when analysing your chances to rank for a given keyword?
— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) April 27, 2022

Google itself has consistently denied that it uses any form of sitewide authority metric in its ranking algorithm. But I can think of at least two ways how a high website authority can indirectly contribute toward a higher ranking on Google:

A. Internal links

High DR means that a given website has lots of strong pages with high authority. And the page that you see ranking on Google may be receiving lots of “link juice” from such pages, making it a high-authority page too (even in the absence of backlinks from other websites).

B. Familiar brand

When presented with a list of search results, many people will prefer to click on the websites that are familiar to them. Google is allegedly tracking some “behavioral factors” to better understand if people were satisfied with the search results. And that can lead to “familiar websites” getting a ranking preference because that is what searchers want to get.

3. Investigate the search intent

Your ability to address the search intent is of utmost importance for ranking well on Google. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, search intent is basically the expectation that searchers have. Google’s goal is to fulfill people’s expectations when they perform a search.

Many marketers (including our own Joshua Hardwick) tend to group all searches into four distinct search intent buckets: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial.

But I’m not a big fan of that approach.

Let me give an example. Instead of trying to figure out if the search query “backlink checker” is informational, navigational, or transactional (and what that means for your page anyway), it is much more productive to review the actual top-ranking pages for that keyword and analyze what searchers get from them.

SERP overview for "backlink checker"