SEO tools "difficulty" rating for ranking - mostly nonsense?

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Just wonder what people think - I sometimes use Traffic Travis to do a quick scan of pages 1 and 2 of the SERPS for keyword competition. Like many tools it has this Difficulty rating going from Extremely Difficult (no stars) to Extremely Easy (5 stars).

Apart from the fact that the idea of difficulty is very subjective in SEO (what's difficult for one person, right...) my feeling is that these ratings are pretty debatable a lot of the time.

I mean, Traffic Travis isn't Google, right, they can't REALLY know exactly how all the on- and off-page factors come together to affect ranking. Same goes for Market Samurai, Micro-Niche whassit'sname and all the other tools with that kind of functionality.

I certainly don't pay much attention to their rating, I really use the different indicators TT lists for you to form my own gut feeling, same as I do when using SEOQuake, say.

I am thinking of tackling a keyword that TT says is "Extremely Difficult" just for the hell of it. Thoughts?
#search engine optimization #difficulty #nonsense #ranking #rating #seo #tools
  • You've gotta keep in mind all they can do is mash a bunch of numbers together in an algorithm and spit out ONE number or color or whatever. This can never be that accurate.

    It can however save you some time by just eyeballing them, and then manually checking competition when you see something that may be promising.
  • Google runs the show, and they give some hopes to new sites to stick at TOP 10. What happens NEXT is the key to the success of any site in Google's rankings...

    Example: site grabs not only attention from the public but also a good chunk of "interaction". This is the example of site that Google wants to keep at TOP.

    Example 2: site doesn't grab much attention, Google confirms this using their tools (adsense, analytics or the back to search function) and site gets dumped out of top 10...

    I mean, this isn't magic, it's just a "market rule". If you had a coffee shop and people hated the coffee, would you keep on trying with it, OR would you change the coffee to a different brand? Google does the same. The trick is to grab that opportunity and make it count.
  • VERY true Fernando - there's a whole lot more going on now with the algo - bounce factor and time spent on page (though some SEOs still dispute this!! Well, keep dreaming!), social signals, brand signals etc. That is stuff a tool like TT, MS or MNF simply can't quantify.

    As chenkev says, those tools give you a great overview of the on- and off-page factors, but I don't think the difficulty factor should be taken at all seriously. In fact, there may well be opportunities in supposedly "extremely difficult" niches to take a piece of the pie
  • Even the toughest niches can be taken - as long as people take the opportunity Google gives to new sites to show up at TOP 10 (as this, in itself, is very confusing, cause in some markets you just have to create a 2 pages sites, and in REALLY hard markets you have to create a powerhouse of 20-50 pages...)

    But WHEN people get that "bonus" to get a 2-3 weeks TOP 10 ranking, if their site PROVES to Google it deserves to stay there, it will stick. Problem is, vast majority of people think they just need more backlinks - when the deal is way different and backlinks is just a small part of it. Google wants more then just backlinks.
    • [1] reply
    • Shhh! Now you're giving away too many secrets!

      But it's OK, because most people don't want to know this, probably because spammy backlinks can be bought cheaply, whereas quality content and on-page experience for the user raises the bar too much for many small-time niche-site builders as they don't have the writing skills or budget to procure the kind of content that helps a site "stick".

      I am definitely testing things like this at the moment - too early to say for sure, but my feeling is that big changes are afoot. Yes, probably tons of quality links will always win at the end of the day, at least for the foreseeable future, but they are getting progressively harder to obtain for most SEOs.
      • [1] reply
  • the quality is the key with content and seo on page and off page and you will in top 10
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    SEO tools "difficulty" rating for ranking - mostly nonsense?

    Just wonder what people think - I sometimes use Traffic Travis to do a quick scan of pages 1 and 2 of the SERPS for keyword competition. Like many tools it has this Difficulty rating going from Extremely Difficult (no stars) to Extremely Easy (5 stars). Apart from the fact that the idea of difficulty is very subjective in SEO (what's difficult for one person, right...) my feeling is that these ratings are pretty debatable a lot of the time.