How Difficult Are Your Keywords?
July 13th, 2007 by CourtGood websites and blogs target a main set of keywords. With most of my sites, I will target 3-5 keywords with my homepage. This site is about ‘make money online’, ‘make money online free’, ‘earn money online’, ‘internet marketing’, ‘make money blogging’, and some other subjects, so I naturally target all of those keywords.
Choosing Keywords
When you choose the keywords you want your site to be about, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to get ranked for your site’s keywords? Some keywords are extremely difficult. I’ve chosen a few of those, but at least I knew what I was getting myself into. If you’re just starting out, I would recommend choosing some easier ones. You can move toward more difficult ones after you get some experience.
Let’s have a look at the keywords I’ve chosen so that we can get an idea of how difficult they are. In order to get an idea of how difficult each of the keywords are, I’m going to use the keyword difficulty tool at SEOChat.com. It shows difficulty by percentage – the higher the percentage, the more difficult the keyword is to target.
- ‘make money online’ – 81.85%
- ‘make money online free’ – 83.7%
- ‘internet marketing’ – 84.58%
- ‘make money blogging’ – 80.96%
- ‘earn money online’ – 66.17%
The top four keywords are going to be nearly impossible for most beginners, but the bottom one would be attainable. Even if you know what you’re doing, plan on working for about a year to get ranked on the first page of Google for the top four. Even though ‘earn money online’ doesn’t get searched for as much as some of the others, it brings me the most traffic – because it’s an easier keyword.
Now let’s take a look at some of the long-tail keywords I regularly get traffic from:
- how to find out if supplemental google – 49%
- insert google adsense on my blog – 45.64%
- how to float my adsense unit – 5.48%
These keywords are obviously quite a bit easier to target, and you can see why I go after long-tail keywords for my Saturday case study, HowToMobile.com.
Keyword Difficulty Rules
- If you’re a new blogger or webmaster, go after keywords that have less than 70% difficulty.
- If you go after keywords that have more than 80% difficulty, plan on working for about a year before you get to the first page in Google.
- For instant traffic, target keywords that have less than 50% difficulty.
How difficult are your keywords? I would love to know how difficult the words are that everyone is going after. Who is going after the hardest keyword? Does anyone target one that’s harder than ‘internet marketing’? Who targets the easiest one?
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July 13th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Hey Court -
Thanks for the tip on the SEOchat tool. Can I make a suggestion? Could you set your links to open in a new window? I want to stay on your posts while I check out your recommendations. That way I can bounce back and forth between the two.
Thanks!
July 13th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I have people complain on both sides of that issue.
I decided to open them in the same window so people have a choice.
PC Users – Right click on the link and select open in new window.
Mac Users – Hold command-option-shift and click the link to open in a new window.
July 13th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
I didn’t know about this SEO tool. That’s pretty nifty.
July 13th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
I’m glad you like it V.!
July 13th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
Great post Court.
I was just looking into buying some adwords. This will definitely help me out.
-Bryan
July 14th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I didn’t even think about using it for adwords, but it would definitely with that as well!
July 13th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Thanks for the tips as always Court! I was wondering how accurate you think the pagerank predictor tools are? I have tried a few and get very different results. Is there any that you use that you like?
July 14th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
They’re not super accurate, but you can get a general idea of what kind of momentum you have by using them.
July 13th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Hey Court this is sweet. I think that this will help out a lot. Could you put this in your tool page when you get a chance?
July 14th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
It’s there!
July 14th, 2007 at 12:58 am
this tool is great and it’s put KEI into an easy understand percentage.
But this tool is not that useful, it’s just too time consuming. i suggest using tools like webceo, webposition and wordtracker. now, you can get most of the tool for free. Webceo have a free version.
July 14th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I really like WebCEO as well, except it’s annoying to load the entire program when you just want to check one aspect of a keyword.
July 14th, 2007 at 12:58 am
I’m also going after ‘make money blogging’. A week or so ago I found myself number four on the search for that on Google (which is shocking to me), but I believe I’ve dropped off.
I’m also going after things like “make cash online” and “make dollars blogging”, varieties of things like that.
I probably should sit down and tell myself what keywords I want to target so I’ll be more focused.
Great post!
July 14th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
It’s pretty common to be ranked highly for a short period of time Tay. Keep working on your link popularity and your good rankings will stabilize.
July 14th, 2007 at 2:55 am
I agree with what your saying Court. However I have found that you can rank for competitive words for new blogs/sites if you have the right links and content. My blog has been going just over 3 months. However I rank at position 23 on google.com for “make money online” at first I had a long term strategy for ranking for that keyword. It is my first blog I have set up. Just trying to spread some inspiration among fellow noobies.
If I were first starting out I would take on your advice, and start out with more long tail keywords that can still drive a lot of traffic.
July 14th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Hi Martin! First of all congratulations on your ranking, that’s an awesome achievement. I still don’t think it would be fair to say that anyone could do that because it isn’t easy.
To be fair, people should also know that your domain is 28 months old, even though your blog has only been there for 3 months.
Having a domain that is over a year old gives you a huge advantage over people that are starting from scratch, so I stick with my observation that people should plan on waiting for at least a year to get to the first page of Google. Neither one of us is there yet, even though we have domains that are over a year old.
July 14th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Very true Court, I domain was expired. After registration it appears that Google still sees the age of the domain as an authoraty, even tho the site is different and only been going 3 months. Most def worth checking out expired domains.
Jim Boykin spends a lot of time finding established sites, contacts them offering to buy them and then makes money off them, I think he’s doing very well out of it. A good money making idea.
July 14th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Very true Martin, people should look into buying expired domains and established sites more often. It a lot easier to get ranked well, that’s for sure!
July 14th, 2007 at 8:03 am
Nice tool! My keywords are the same as yours.
July 14th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
I’ll meet you at the top Casey.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
[...] Tuttle has an original article discussing keyword difficulty. If you are thinking of starting up a new niche site, I highly recommend checking this article out [...]
July 25th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Great post as usual, unfortunately you mentioned my keywords and there is a lot of competition in that area.
December 13th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
So how do you know how hard is to target some keywords, without the difficulty analyzer, I thought just by doing “link:+domainOfAdversary” would give you a good idea, on how many liks you need?
buy art online
January 6th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Thanks for that, very useful post. Just used the keyword difficulty tool and found some long-tail keywords that may be better to target in the short term.
February 10th, 2008 at 10:41 am
good post, court
May 19th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Keyword research is the most time consuming thing for me at the moment, it can tie you up in knots if you let yourself get ‘number bound’. I like what you’re saying here about the long tails – definitely the way forward for me.
March 29th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
For the Difficulty keyword Tool what difference will the make if you put the keyword within quote marks “keyword” ? I notice the result drops by 20% but is it relevant ? Does this mean anything ?
May 14th, 2012 at 5:14 am
Hey court, i m confused, lesser the keyword difficulty lesser will be the audience for that particular keyword!!!