The keyword difficulty is an extra measure to help you decide what keywords to choose.
Each keyword will be given a difficulty score of either ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, ‘High’, or ‘Very High’.
A ‘Very High’ difficulty score would indicate this keyword is very difficult to rank for in Google. A ‘Low’ difficulty score keyword would be much easier and quicker to rank for.
Naturally, it will be easier to rank for keywords that have a Low’ or ‘Medium’ difficulty score. Therefore, if you’re new to SEO, we would recommend targeting these keywords first.
As you become more established & your SEO performance improves, you can then work towards targeting the keywords with a higher difficulty score.
So how is it worked out?
It’s a calculation where we look at the DA (domain authority) of the websites ranking for that keyword on page 1 in Google & decide how difficult it is to rank in the top 10 results.
As a very simple example, the keyword “SEO” has a 'Very High' difficulty because the top 10 ranking websites all have a high DA.
However, for a keyword such as “SEO freelancers in Lands End”, the difficulty will be lower as the top 10 ranking websites will have (on average) lower DA.