#5. How to use Keyword Difficulty metric in Ahrefs
I guess you noticed that we have a metric called Keyword Difficulty, or KD in Ahrefs.
Remember I was talking about the magic tool that would solve all your ranking problems?
Well, a lot of people feel exactly this way when they first see our Keyword Difficulty metric.
And then get rather disappointed, when it doesn't live up to their expectations.
All because there's nothing magical about this metric.
It is simply a proxy to an average number of linking websites among the top 10 search
results for your keyword.
Remember I told you that links will help you get in top 10,
and once you're there, a lot of additional ranking factors will kick in?
Well, that is why the hint below the Keyword Difficulty number says:
"You'll need backlinks from ~X websites to rank in top 10 for this keyword."
See? We don't promise that you'll rank #1.
And we put a tilde in front of the number of linking websites so that to let you know that
it is an approximation.
And my recent example with search results for "chocolate lab" is a great illustration
on why you cannot blindly rely on this approximation.
Six of the top ranking pages actually have less than 10 backlinks, but KD score says you'll need 38.
That's because the other three outliers skew the average to a bigger number.
And yet, Keyword Difficulty is insanely useful when you need to narrow down a huge list of
keyword ideas to those where you don't need a lot of backlinks to rank.
Because reviewing the top 10 search results for a few thousands of keywords will take you ages.
And to make a final decision on a keyword, you should always review the top ranking pages.
There's no way around it.
Please also keep in mind that our Keyword Difficulty score is not linear.
Keyword Diffculty 10 means you'll need backlinks from approximately 10 websites in order to rank
on the front page of Google.
While KD 70 means that you'll need links from 202 websites.
And KD 90 means that you'll need links from 756 websites.
It's up to you to decide which score is easy and which is difficult.
But our customers kept asking us this question, so we had to define four ranges to make it a bit
easier for them.
So KD below 10 is considered easy, because almost anyone can get links from up to 10 websites.
From 10 to 30 we have medium difficulty, because getting up to 36 websites link to you
is quite a challenge
Anything above 30 we consider hard, for obvious reasons.
And anything above 70 is super-hard
because only a few websites are able to generate that many backlinks to their pages.
So how many backlinks do you think you can get with your own blog?
We have a report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool that may help you to figure this out.
Let me plug the URL of Ahrefs' blog and go to a report called Best by links.
Here I can see our best performing articles, by the number of websites linking to them.
And it looks like our best articles have from a 100 and up to 350 referring domains.
Which, according to our Keyword Difficulty scale, means that we can target keywords with
Keyword difficulty up to 80.
And anything above that would be quite challenging for us.
So pause this video and plug your own blog into Ahrefs' Site Explorer to see how many
backlinks your best articles have.
And by the way, you might be wondering where we get these numbers of backlinks and if you
can trust this data.
I'm glad you asked, because it is our favourite thing to brag about.
Ahrefs' bots have to crawl the entire internet to collect this information.
Which is pretty hard to do to be honest.
As of today, we crawl 4.1 million pages every minute.
And according to a third-party study, Ahrefs bot is the second most active after Google.
In other words, you can trust our backlink data.
And that wraps up lesson #3.
I hope you've learned a lot about analyzing keywords for traffic potential and ranking
difficulty, so it's about time I show you four sources of content ideas that will help you
fill your content calendar for a full year ahead.
Sounds good?
Then I'll see you in lesson #4.