Matt's been hard at work this week, upgrading SEOmoz's KW Difficulty Tool. It's now faster, more accurate and comes with spiffier graphics. In honor, I thought it would be valuable to write a post on how to read this data:
From the top, you can run new reports or view your existing reports from the past. We're nice enough to store all the data for you, which can really come in handy. We do require that you login and provide a Google API Key - search engines don't like the scraping and it allows us to store your reports for you.
BTW - On average, it's taking between 7 and 12 minutes for a report to run, but there's no need to keep the tool open, as you can set the option to have it email you (to your SEOmoz profile email) when it's finished.
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The color coded chart at the top is there to provide a good reference for how competitive the term is. The percentage number provided (in the example above, 76% for "Superman Returns") isn't going to be precise, but it's useful for comparison purposes, and we've found, through experience, that the text chunks next to the color are pretty accurate in describing the level of work required to rank well.
This list of factors gives you the breakdown of how the tool is scoring. You can see that, for example, the number of results for a search at quotes in Google gives us 29,300,000, which easily fits our criteria for 100% of the possible difficulty on that factor. For those who are seeking pure data, these numbers are pure gold. They'll also help a savvy SEO determine why one score might be unbalanced compared to another - remember, the tool isn't perfect, just useful :)
The next two sectors show us the top 10 ranking pages/sites at Google & Yahoo!. We use this data to help figure out how strong these sites are and what it might take to rank in front of them. What you're seeing in the blue gradient bar is a graphic representation of toughness for each result. Yes - there are sometimes site with lower strength ranking in front of sites with higher strength (in this case, IMDB and BlueTights are both "stronger" than the offical movie site by our metrics), but reviewing this data can be invaluable to help see just who is in the rankings and why they're ranking so well. If you click the "view details" link we take you to this data:
This final piece gives you a look at how we measure "strength" for each of the top ranked sites - checking data like how many sites link to them, their PageRank, the number of links from valuable edu, gov and mil sites and listings in places like Wikipedia, the Yahoo! Directory & DMOZ (and mentions in Google News).
Hopefully you'll all enjoy using the upgraded tool. I can tell you that we find it invaluable in the day to day tasks of SEO for clients - reviewing their sites and their competition to help discover what's going on beneath the surface of the SERPs.
If you've got comments, questions or suggestions, we'd love to hear them!
Wow, nice tool. One question though: Would it be possible to have a Euro-Zone version of this? One that uses the € as currency and allows you to point to your specific country website of Google and Yahoo?
That would make the tool even more valuable to non-US citizens.
hi :-
Is there any kind of internationalisation with this tool?
I'm based in the UK and would primarily be interested in Google UK-only searches.
A few others requested this as well: an international version where you can select country. I'm from Denmark, and as an example of discrepancy, Yahoo only constitutes 8% of searches here.
If you're not going to internationalize the tool, can you tell me if analyses for foreign keywords are highly inaccurate?
Thanks!Mads
Wow thanks. I used your tool and it helped me a lot. we have a search engine optimization contest here in the philippines and I got number one.lol. because I got the wrong keyword. The keyword is ituloy angsulong but I optimized for ituloy angisulong. Thanks again! I learned my mistakes.
Anybody else having trouble with this tool? I'm running some reports today (Jan 4, 2008), and they've been running on for 2 hours now with no results. I don't know where the hang up is, but it's tough to rely on a tool like this for research and incorporate it into a routine when it's less-than-reliable...
The Overture bidtool is no longer available, and rumour has it that Yahoo may be removing the Keyword Selector Tool as well. Could you please advise how this will impact your keyword difficulty tool? (Which I have been using for several months and think is awesome...I have been able to create just over 300 pages optimised for keywords which are now on the first page of Google)
Thanks for a great service.
This tool stopped woking for me yesterday - appears to be in an endless loop?
Hi
I love this tool- I dont know how I did without in the past. I am absolutely convinced that if one uses this tool on a regular basis, one gets a feeling for ideal long-tail keywords with acceptable competition. Just one point on my wishlist: Would it be possible to delete all or part of my past searches in one stoke? If I do it one by one, it is quite time-consuming. Advantage: frees your database...
Many thanks for this outstanding tool
zorcolino
Big thumbs up on this suggestion. I love this tool as well and use it frequently - probably more than any other SEOmoz tool. But that one-at-a-time deleting process really slows me down, and I generally like to keep a clean house.
I second this motion - if we could delete all (or a group) of the reports all at once that would be killer.
Such a great tool this is!
But one thing would make it significantly better for me: being able to choose a local google (in my case www.google.nl) instead of google.com. Virtually all my clients will be searched for using google.nl. Therefor knowing the difficulty on google.nl would be worth much more to me than knowing the difficulty on google.com.
Thanks in advance!
Wow! Thanks for the upgrade Rand and special thanks to Matt for all of the programming. I have really enjoyed this tool and find it to be very useful.
Anyone who is not using this tool is missing out big time. If your not using it get off of your butt and try it.
A couple of suggestions.
1) If the tablulated results from a RUN were placed in column table form with one website per row of the table it would be very very easy to scan and compare. I know that I would learn a lot more from this as it would allow me to compare the sites easily. The data from one site alone is useless but when compared it becomes extremely valuable. I run this tool mainly to compare my sites against competitors.
2) If I could compare the results of one URL from a history of runs on the same KW that would be fantastic. I suspect that this could be accomplished with the quick strength tool. This could be used by SEO consultants to benchmark and report their work to clients (rand you need to put a small fee on this as it would be so valuable - third party benchmarking). Would also be use by stat hounds like me.
I couldn't agree more - having the keyword difficulty tool allow for comparison would be fantastic. Hopefully in the next few months we can start rolling out those features. I'd love it if users could select multiple reports and get an aggregate view of them with visuals (graphs, etc).
Fantastic! Thanks Matt, you guys are the best!
The use of the Free Wordtracker utility has me scratching my head in confusion. My experience with that tool is that it's data is old to the point of obsolescense. A reasonable test is to search for the year, or some derivative like "2008 calendar". Then take those numbers and rerun them for the previous year.
Compare:
Searches for "2006": 9,289
Searches for "2007": 35,233
Searches for "2008": 4,310
How can this possibly represent what happened yesterday? Why was "2007 calendar" searched for more than five times as often as "2008 calendar"?
It makes no sense, and makes me wonder if I have to purchase Wordtracker to get reliable numbers. If I'm missing something I'm happily listening.
Some ideas to improve"
1) Abort a report. I type in my info and then realize that I mistyped the keyword. I can't stop it!
2) Run multiple reports at one time. Though I understand the usage issues there. Alternatively, the ability to queue keyword reports would be great. When one finished the other would be kicked off.
3) Clean up my reports list. I want to delete old , "bad" or "errored" reports. Maybe even organize my reports in folders by website or keyword grouping.
:-)
All three are on my todo list, as well as cleaning up the interface and integrating it with page strength. We're going to bundle the upgrade with the re-launch of seomoz, so look for it in 6-8 weeks.
This tool is fantastic! I just discovered it today, and I'm very pleased.
I have one simple feature request. For privacy sake, as well as removing typos, please let us delete reports.
Thanks!
This tool gives a good overview and quick asessment how strong the competition is as long as... you are based in the US. It would be nice if you could choose which local Google and Yahoo you want to use, in my case Google Germany (Google.de) or de.yahoo.com. There the results differ significantly. Especially the Yahoo results are alomst useless if you take the international ones.
Hello, I was having some reports done over keyword difficulty last time, I am more targeting the google.co.uk market. I did look at the google keyword tool which shows huge search of specific keyword in month of april and that of on united states it is less searched so my query is , Does it consider google.com as defauly for reflecting. I think there should be an option to select the right country speicific search engine t to get perfect result.
As there is isnt any option over wordtracker to select country to know speicific keyword searched by country. So if i dont have a .com domain does keyword difficulty disquality to bring right result ?
Very nice tool.
The report summary mentions the link strength (inbound links) required to compete, but does anyone have any guidelines for the link strength scale?
What kind of numbers are we talking about for a link strength of:
Light
Moderate
Substantial
Robust
Overwhelming
Fantastic tool for those who have sites in the states.
I notice by reading the thread that their have been over 4 requests for it to be internationalised. eg google.au. Is there any movement on this??
I would love to see it donwloadable into an excel file. Also, we would love an option to run multiple keywords at the sametime.
Yes, I have the same question. What is “moderate” inbound links?
I like this tool. It makes my work faster.But I have noticed an issue that makes it less effective. In fact, because of it, I’m not really using the % of difficult (I just use it to quickly see in the same interface: “allintitle”, “incoming links”, “page strength”, etc.).The “number of searches last day” uses the Wordtracker keyword suggesting fee tool. The problem is that, if the “searches” were zero, it gives a 0% value. If they were, lets say, 10, it gives the value of 100%. So, jus because of that data, a “ranking difficult may vary between 21% to 60%.That tool, as we all know, is not really trustworthy, at least not enough for changing the ranking factor in that proportion. As an example, lots of term I’m researching get 3 to 10 click a day trough adwords, but WT gives them “0” search a day.I hope you can get what I’m saying despite my poor English.Cheers!
Can I ask where you set the function for it to email the report to us?
Did you get a reply to this message? I would like to know the answer as well. Plus my reports have not been run since Jan. 21 and they are supposed to be run every 3 days. Julie Vetter
What does the Domain Visibility number explain?
This tool isn't working for me - i entered sine word terms and it came back with a error both times -- "keyword not found".
Hello Matt,
KEYWORD DIFFICULTY is a very cool tool. Respect.
But: How can a use it for example with keywords searches in German-Google?
Wordtracker gives me ZERO results for a special keyword combination.But the german google keyword-tool (API-center) shows me 12.000 hits monthly searching the same combination.
So which result should i put into "Enter WordTracker Number of Searches"???
Thanks for your help and sorry for my english.
A little confused on how to interpret the information being presented by the tool, in particular what each column of the section below means:
URL LinksDomain LinksPosition at GGAge of Domain.edu .gov linksAlexa RankDomain visibilityInternal link %Tech. linksDel. linksDMOZ linksWiki. LinksGG PR
and does number 1 in this section of the report relate to number of the top 10 ranking sites at google?
Do you have a certain formula by which you derive the percentage of the results? I am just interested to know. Thanks!
Uhh?
Maybe I missed the announcement? I can't Run the Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion tool because the link on the tool's page takes you to "502 Bad Gateway" You gotta be a wordtracker member now? Can we just use google's new #s? Or SEOBook's?
thanks.
Is there way of breaking out the number of searches in a particular area? For example the old tool would give the number of searches in Canada (only); can this be found out with the new tool?
Thanks,
Dan
[email protected]
I don't understand why wordtracker has so much weight with this tool. Can anyone tell me why? thanks
I don't understand why wordtracker has so much weight with this tool. Can anyone tell me why? thanks
I ran the tool for "freelance writing" and received an error message:
"We were unable to calculate a score for the term you entered: No search results found for term"
I ran the report both with and without quotes, and received the same message.
Excellent tool, but it would be much more useful if you could select a local version of Google to get top ranking sites from.
I'm sure you can do uk specific research on wordtracker. Will have to go back and double check. I find the search numbers so much lower than google's keyword tool, so hard to know true figures.
Running a report for Work Boots gave me an error
I have some of the issues posted above. On the repeated bug posts it seems odd an answer is not posted.
Is there a place where known issues are posted that I am missing? Seems like the link to this article at the bottom of the tool would be a good place to post updates, but the article is from 2006. hmmm.
I have not seen Yahoo results for any searches since I signed up a week ago. This is 2009. Is there anyway to find out if this is an issue, a known issue?
Noticing that my reports yesterday and today are missing the keywords at thet top. I see the report, but when I click on it, it shows the data, but doens't show the actual keywords for the report.
Like a lot of other comments - please allow choice of country-specific Google search. I'm in the UK so returning google.com results are pointless.
Hi, this is very very good tool but, i can use in google.es?
Thanks.
Is the tool broken? Every time I try to run a report, it displays "Finished with errors".
hey guys.
I have to say that I was inspired by your tool to come and develop my own "seo-pricing" tool. I have added 2 more parameters to be calculated for the total result pricing:
1. checking the average code errors for the first 10th competitors.
2. checking the keywords density percentage of the landing page for each competitors.
I guess I can get really accurate here...
Seems to return a bunch of wrong sites, like I searched for 'business directory' and got google books in the top 10 :s
my bad - ignore me (or punch me) ... re-read it and it was fine.
I think this is a great tool BUT
- please offer a detailed explantation of what each item means (ie GG and the number mean something to you, but nothing to me. I get it is Google, but what is the 5)
- you have a bug - when I try to link to the details of the strength report I cannot - I get an please enter a valid URL page - I am getting this on all links on that page that offer more information.
I just convinced my CEO to purchase this today. I am going to have trouble validating the purchase if I cannot produce the data or proplerly interpret what the data means.
Please take a peek at your bug and just add a tooltip or title tag to all items, so we can rollover and get an explanation. Thanks!!! Otherwise great info!!
So I feel like I am the last to know...but is the overture dead forever? Or is it still doing that 'when I am not angry w/you, I will help you estimate traffic to your site.' thing?
Attention all! Google recently stopped giving out API keys which was required to run a keyword difficulty tool. I've modified the tool so it no longer requires a key so all of our new users should be able to run reports now.
Quick question, which may be obvious to most but not to me. ;)
Where do I get a Google API key?
I am logged into my Google account and am at the API home page but do not see a way to get a key.
Please advise and thanks.
I noticed that the result is different when "www" is added to a URL than when it is not.
e.g. https://abc-company.com and https://www.abc-company.com.
Can you explain why and which one I should use?
Thanks!
I may have missed the explanation, but I'm confused on what the "Position at GG" is referring to since the 1-10 results match up with the Google search results (or Yahoo for the Yahoo data), so I'm not seeing what this is in reference too.
It's using the quick strength tool, so it checks the ranking position of the page for the first 4 terms in the title tag of the page (at Google - GG).
Any chance you would introduce some kind of limited membership with access just to the Keyword Difficulty Tool? :). I can live without the premium content and all the other tools, but I'm hooked on the Keyword Difficulty Tool and I see you guys stopped it now. I can't afford the $39/month, but I could pay $5-10/month just for that awesome tool :).
Tried 3-4 others that are similar, but no joy. I don't trust their results.
Please update your site. It currently says this tool is "free and it only takes a moment to register." After I registered, I learned it is no longer free. I understand if it is not, but we shouldn't have to register to learn the truth. Thanks!
I went to the page for the tool, and the first thing that I saw was this...
Cache cleaning time.
Awesome tool and can't wait for the update to be posted! Thanks for the great tool and awesome resource site!
The tool has been taking 30 minutes+ lately -- which is too long to do any serious research. If there was a way to upgrade so that it ran faster I'd consider paying for it (as long as it was fairly reasonably priced).
The new seomoz site is scheduled to launch at the beginning of january. You can expect to see some pretty dramatic improvements in the speed and reliability of the keyword difficulty tool.
Is there any method to speed this up ? maybe an donation or something ?
I'm working on improving the speed, but it might be a few weeks.
I'm late getting here...but I love this tool. And use it extensively.
It would be helpful if you defined the quick link strength of the different sites within the top ten in Y and G and describe how you arrived at the quick link numbers.
Dave
nice indeed =) cant wait to see the end result. looks promising :)
I've really tried to find this one by myself, but I'm giving up... So could someone explain me what the "Percentage of hosts in top 10" in the Keyword difficulty tool is referring to?
Thank you, Julien
Julien, It's referring to the number of sites in the top 10 at google for the target term that are root URLs. For instance, www.seomoz.org is a root URL, www.seomoz.org/some-sub-page/ is not.
Root URLs typically have more authority in the SERPs than sub-pages, so we increase the percentage of difficulty if the majority of the results are root URLs.
Wording it like "percentage of hosts in the top 10" isn't particularly clear, I can understand your confusion.
Amazing, thank you Oatmeal!
Hey guys. Love the tool. Just wondering how long untill the new version is ready. In the 27th september post you say 6-8 weeks. Is it near completion by any chance? :)
And couple of questions and things I don't understand. Maybe you can explain them a bit if you don't mind.
First, is the tool working ok right now? It seems to miss some calculations lately. For example, looking for the difficulty for "toddler" it gives me no results for the lines below .. and the same for other terms .. for toddler gives a difficulty of just 40%, because of the missing lines below I imagine.
3. Number of results for google search in quotes 0% 4. Number of results for allintitle search at google 0% 5. Number of results for intitle/inanchor search at Google 0%
And I have some curiosities about some of the things that the tool takes into consideration. Are the top 3 overture bids and the number of searches needed when calculating the kw dificulty? Isn't the ability to rank for a keyword influenced just by your competitors?
Best regards and really looking forward to the next version.
My report has been running for about 12 hours, is something wrong? Should I start over?
I'll take a look, the script probably died. In the meantime I would re-run your report.
Hi Matt,
The reporting tool seems to be messed up. I'm getting a run date of
12/31/1969
And it's been running for the past few hours with no result.
Hi Guys,
I am noticing that when I run reports in this tool I don't receive complete results. For instance I always get the top 10 sites on Google, but nothing for Yahoo. I know there are sites related to the keywords I'm researching, but its not showing here...any advice?
Otherwise, this is a very cool tool, many thanks!
D.
All kw difficulty reports I run return with status "Finished with errors". When I click them, it says "We were unable to calculate a score for the term you entered: No search results found for term". I tried both narrow and broad keywords (e.g. childrens clothing), but none worked. Is anyone else experiencing this? I really need this tool right now...
Hello,
The tool has been working great for analyzing google's rankings, works great on the top 10.
When it coms to yahoo, i have been getting one or zero sites.
Either way, love the tool. Just letting you know whats up.
Evan Jerkunica
My favorite tool on seomoz...amazing
I am confused about a report. I ran one for "Dallas Dining" and the "top 10 at Google" is from the local maps results: dallas dining on google.
Is that correct? I thought it would have the top 10 organic results instead. That would have been more helpful.
Dear SEOmoz Staff,
I seem to have continual problems utilizing the SEO tools - this one in particular. While using Firefox, if I run 2-3 reports at a time I am eventually unable to do anything. At that point even the SEOmoz.org home page becomes inaccessible. I'm only able to access anything at the site after waiting about 10 minutes.
I'm wondering if I'm the only one experience this problem. I don't have any similar problems with any other web-based applications.
Just wondering if you guys can shed any light on this.
Thanks!
-Mike Tekula
Cool tool!
Just wondering about the Wordtracker count...
As far as I understand, the WT count provided by the free tool is the predicted DAILY. But the KW difficulty asks (and reports) for monthly searches.
Should we be multiplying the WT count by 30, or is it correct as is?
Thanks
John
Just wondering...is this thread/tool dead?
Excellent point - let me check with Jeff & Mel and see how we're processing that data and we'll put a note on the page so noone gets confused.
Thanks for the heads up!
ozonesem has a point, yes. Example: Per latest counts, "visa platinum" in WT is 49, whereas in OV it's 6937. Also, that's a huge diff even with a counts adjustment (6937 vs. 1470).
What would be great, given the continued uncertainty around OV's tool dead/not dead, would be for SEOmoz to update the tool to let users use either OV or WT counts at their convenience.
Myself, I'm still configured for (bulk) processing of OV counts, despite this ...and would strongly prefer to keep it that way as (and just first of all) it's most convenient for keeping everything automated.
Hey guys,
I love the tool, but it's maddly innaccurate. It said there were zero allintitle competitors for "travel insurance." Thankfully, I know that's not true.
Would be good to have it return an "unable to complete search" or something if one of the sources kicks back for some reason.
I love the tool and I have a suggestion.
For one of the metrics, the tool finds the number of pages that have the exact keyword phrase that was typed in. For relatively uncompetitive phrases, the permutations of a keyphrase shuffle the SER less. Therefore, I think it would be useful to check some of the permutations of that keyphrase in the analysis.
Cheap Taipei Flights
Cheap Flights Taipei
Taipei Cheap Flights
Tapei Flights Cheap
Flights Taipei Cheap
Flights Cheap Taipei
I would be interested in the first five term permutations but not the last. So, one could request only certain terms to be factored into that part of the metric.
While it would increase the search time to include extra permutations, it may also eliminate the need for additional searches of permutations. Furthermore, the number of permutations could be limited to a few and the use of this feature would count toward the "5 reports simultaneously" limit.
Thanks,
Evan
I noticed that the tool asks for Overture numbers from last month, but since Overture is still reporting from January why not change this to MSN's report from their adlab (https://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx)
Hey Matt,
Not sure if you're still checking this thread, but I've noticed over the last few days that Overture is returning no results for any queries currently. I'm wondering if it's been permanently disabled.
Since this tool is reliant on that data what is the plan moving forward if Overture continues to be unresponsive? It's a great tool - I'd hate to see it go. I use it all the time.
Hey Mike, I swapped out the overture tool with the free wordtracker tool today.
Thanks Matt!
Out of curiosity - do you think it looks like Inventory.Overture is dead for good this time? That's the word on the street. . .
"...to have it email you (to your SEOmoz profile email) when it's finished..."
Typo - pls change "email" to read "emailed"