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Traffic Travis: Difficulty Rating - true or not?

by BrainCandy
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey Warriors,

for a few weeks now I have been using the free version of Traffic Travis to analyse keywords. The more I work with the program the less I understand it I must say.

I am new into niche websites. To find a good niche I have checked my keywords with traffic travis to have a first evaluation.

The funny thing is that it estimates some keywords to be medium difficult although the shown links do not have backlinks, no pagerank and no title / h1 tag. Mostly they are from bigger sites like amazon.

Then there are results where there are competitors with some backlinks, pagerank and even title/h1. Still the keyword is estimated as to be relatively easy.

Whats up with this? Can you trust it or do you mostly estimate it yourself?

Thanks
#difficulty #rating #traffic #travis #true
  • Profile picture of the author heavysm
    I have been using it for about a year now and use it as a general guide to tell me keyword difficulty. There are many factors that go into ranking but i find it pretty accurate overall.

    I use it for micro niche sites as well and it will display a 3-5 star rating if there are hundreds or less backlinks (so competitors <=100's) and most dont have good on page SEO. But it will show 1 -2 stars, basically difficult, if sites are have hundreds to thousands of backlinks (competition<=1000) and most sites with good SEO.

    I highly recommend using micro niche sites for 2-5 star keywords and authority sites (30+ posts/pages) for 1 star. I have ranked for a 2 and 3 star keywords with about 400 links and solid on page SEO.

    If i feel iffy about a keyword I just fire up market samurai and look at the anchor text distribution and so on. If you dont have market samurai, just do a yahoo site explorer check of each url in question and do some digging. I honestly don't trust any research method very much for ranking difficulty. I just trust my own efforts to rank and build tons of links.

    Hope this helped =)
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    • Profile picture of the author BrainCandy
      Thats just what I thought. Thanks a lot
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  • Profile picture of the author patey88
    I interpret TT difficulty ratings this way:

    "If your site has an exact match domain name, or age > about 5 years, and you have this keyword in your title, H1 and description, then you will find it (relatively easy, medium difficulty, etc...) to rank your homepage for this keyword."

    That's if I'm thinking about basing a new site around a keyword.

    If I'm thinking about adding a new page of content to an existing site, I usually find that even if I pick a "relatively easy" keyword and put it in the title/h1/desc and filename, I still need some backlinks to get it to rank high.
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