Our SEO Difficulty Score is improved

An important skill for anyone working with SEO, is the ability to measure how difficult or easy it is to rank a certain keyword or keyphrase.

By looking at our keyword pages, for example our swedish list, you can see the SEO Difficulty score for each one of our keywords.

I just spent around 25 hours this week to improve our calculation formula and I thought I'd share the info here in this blog.

How we do the calculation

First of all, we check which URLs are ranking in the top 15 in Google and for every URL we check:

• DomainScore of the domain.
• Ahrefs URL Rating of the URL.
• Ahrefs Domain Rating of the domain.
• Majestic Trustflow of the homepage URL.
• If the domain is an exact matching domain or contains the keyword.
• URL path length.
• Keyword count in all the text of the page.
• Keyword count in title, h1, h2 of the page.
• Word count of the page.

We take all data and do some complex math to give a score between 0 (extremely easy) and 1000 (really difficult).

Doing this manually can be a very tedious task. And in my experience our formula gives a better assessment of the difficulty, than a manual estimate.

Commercial Value and KEI

We (of course) also have a formula to calculate a keyword's Commercial Value.

KEI, Keyword Efficiency Index, is the relationship between the Commercial Value and the SEO difficulty score, calculated simply as: (commercial_value/seo_difficulty) * 100. So the higher the KEI, the better the opportunity in terms of high commercial value in relation to keyword difficulty.

Examples for google.com

Examples for google.se

I hope this will help you make better decisions, and save time in the process.