Keyword Difficulty Factors Co-related to Google Ranking of a Page

Keyword Difficulty: 
Co-related Factors affecting Google ranking

Keyword Difficulty Factors Related to Google Ranking

Ranking any website in Google is not such a difficult task. Ranking any website on the first page of Google and that too in the top 10 is a challenging task. So how can you analyze the possibility of ranking in that league on Google? How Keyword difficulty affects Google ranking?

The first thing is that you have to know the traffic potential of your web article. But this is not a big problem. The bigger problem is to outrank the current articles in your desired niche which are on Google’s first page with your own article to get all the traffic to it. 

But it is really difficult to exactly know that how Google chooses to rank pages in search results because Google uses a large number of variable ranking factors that are not the same for each search query.

First of all, you have to understand, how hard or easy the desirable keywords to rank in the niche are. These keywords should also be quite relatable to the user's search query. In short, you have to check the keyword difficulty. But what is exactly keyword difficulty?

The evaluating process of determining the difficulty level of the keyword (or keywords) for specific terms to rank in the organic search result of Google is known as the keyword difficulty. It is a significant part of keyword research. The various factors on which it is dependent are

• Authority of web page domain 
• Authority of a specific page
• Quality of the content

keyword difficulty helps to identify the most appropriate keywords in the SEO process. 

There are a number of keyword difficulty tools available that give you the difficulty score. Some of the best known are such as from Moz, KWFinder, SEMRush, AHREFs, and Spyfu. 

There are either paid or free or offer some free features. You can select these keyword difficulty checkers and use them as per the requirements.  

Factors affecting Google ranking of the website

A] Google’s search algorithm

The exact process of Google’s search engine algorithm by which it ranks the pages is neither known to us nor would Google tell. But we can get some strong clues by analyzing different pages in different categories using various angles and comparing several factors. 

Now the best information source which could give an indication of this is the webpage with the links pointing it from other web pages.

Let’s assume that the content quality of your webpage is excellent and it is equally relevant to the desired search query and also matches the search intent of users. 

Here we also assume that factors like,

• webpage load time
• page speed
• mobile view optimization 
• visual look 
• user experience 

These are all in better conditions.  These factors of your web pages are at par with the top 10 web pages on Google in your niche.

So for example, if your niche is health-related and you want to publish an article related to ‘weight loss suggestions and tips’. You search for “weight loss tips” on Google. The first result you get is a featuredsnippet from a reputed site like ‘nhs.uk’.

Sample Featured Snippet for Google Search Result

Now if you look at the top 5 pages ranking on Google search for the topic, they are all very good websites with excellent content. You can also see a ‘YouTube’ video at no 5. 

When you check each one of these article pages in detail, you find that each one of them has some pros and cons related to content quality, SEO, readability, and visual user experience. So what makes Google rank them in the top 5? 

Desired key phrase and Google's organic search result

B] User behavioral factors

As the experts say it is assumed that Google uses a variety of different factors to decide which page to rank higher. It is been acknowledged by Google professionals that the behavior of user after visiting any webpage plays an important role in this as Google track it while ranking a page. 

The important factors related to this are

• Active User duration on the webpage 
• Browsing tendency (deeper browsing or immediate closing of the webpage)
• Refinement of search results by going back to get desired results

But all these factors come into play when a user actually visits your site. For that, your webpage should be on the Google Search results first page or in the top 10 precisely.

C] Importance of backlinks and link building

The obvious question is -> 

How to get your webpage in Google’s top 10 search results in your niche?  

The most significant part of this is the links pointing to your webpage from other quality websites. This could get your webpage to the top page of Google. So quality link building is a crucial part of your SEO strategy. 

Just think of these links to your webpage as a choice given by those who are linking. It means they are indirectly telling Google that they prefer your page for their desired topic as compared to other pages. 

The more links like these you get, the chances of your page ranking are higher. Google likes and prefers such pages on the top of search results.

Now coming back to our earlier example of “weight loss tips”, you can analyze Google’s organic search results for this using SEMrush’s Seaquake extension (a free plugin that provides key SEO metrics). 

This gives you the important data of top pages in the search result list called ‘SERP report’.This consists of backlinks, traffic, and social media-related data.

You will observe that the top-ranking pages for this search are all having a large no of backlinks. The top page in the results is from ‘healthline.com’ with 31494 backlinks. 

So this large quantity of links could be a reason which indicates Google search algorithm that this page should be most significant for the search result. This helps it to gain top results in the search list. 

Google search result list with backlinks

But if you observe this list, it is clear that not all the pages having large backlinks are ranked higher as some of the pages having less no of backlinks are higher than larger backlinks pages in the search list. 

This suggests that there is no clear direct and linear relation regarding backlinks in search results because it is not the only factor in Google’s rank algorithm. 

Google uses hundreds of different factors. The number of backlinks of the webpage is just one of them. But still, this is one of the strong influential factors.

A reputed SEO tool provider like  ‘Aherfs’ carried out a study of 2 million random search queries to correlate various ranking factors to page position in Google search. They found out that backlinks have the strongest correlation to Google ranking. This indicates the importance of backlinks. 

If the search result pages for desired keywords in your niche show hundreds of links from various websites then to outrank these pages your webpage should at least get equal or more backlinks.

Let’s explore this with one more example. If you look at Google’s search result for the keyword ‘black bulldog’ in 'SEMrush’s Seoquake extension' just like the earlier examples. Here you can see that two pages which rank in the top 7 are not exactly relevant to our search query just by observing their titles. 

These two pages give information about the general dog breed of ‘Bulldog’ but not exactly of ‘black bulldog’. So why do they rank with exactly relevant web pages?

Quantity of backlinks and Google search ranking relation

Because these two pages have lots of backlinks so they rank among the pages having very few or absolutely no backlinks.  This makes Google algorithm to think them important and impossible to neglect. This clearly shows that the quantity of backlinks to a page and its search traffic from Google is nicely connected.

D] Content idea and topic finalization 

You should always analyze the quantity of linking websites to your competitor pages in desired targeted topic or niche to understand the website traffic potential and competition for the post, you are going to write. This also helps to finalize the content ideas and related keywords. 

You have to review all the possible topics and content ideas related to your niche by the above-discussed method.

• If you want to know the effective steps to boost the traffic to your website, you can check our article titled 

'How to increase organic traffic for blog and website using 7 effective steps '

If you make a list of your topic content, associated keywords, search traffic with the quantity of referring domains (backlinks) for all your competitive pages, then select the content ideas having maximum search traffic and the least backlinks. 

Your goal would be then to create slightly more quality backlinks to outrank those pages in the Google search list. This would certainly help to get your webpage in the top ten of Google with minimum required links.

So these are the significant features that focus and look at some of the key factors associated related to keyword difficulty in a simplified way which helps to assist your chances of ranking higher in Google and increasing the website traffic.

If interested in Google keyword planner then do check the following link,

How to use Google keyword planner free!

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 difficulty semrush| Moz keyword difficulty tool