Working for your business and clients is one thing; finding the time to work on it is another. Our work involves writing SEO-optimised website and blog post content. But, we've neglected our own. To help rectify this, we've settled on Ubersuggest – an SEO tool that specialises in generating and analysing new keyword ideas to help you draw more traffic to your website.
Among other features, Ubersuggest has a Keyword Analyzer. Once you've entered your project and location, you can start trying out different keyword ideas to see how useful they might be. While there is all sorts of useful information on display – such as Cost per Click, Paid Difficulty, Estimates Monthly Visits, and Social Shares – I want to focus on four key statistics: Volume, SEO Difficulty, Links and Domain Authority.
Volume
Volume is the the number of searches conducted for your keyword in 30 days. You want your keyword to have as high a volume as possible, while at the same time low for SEO Difficulty and Domain Authority (see below). It's easy to find keywords that are popular and show hundreds and thousands of individual searches for that term. But a popular search will also attract robust competition. Generally, our rule of thumb is that a Volume per month of less than 300 probably means that a keyword isn't worth it because hardly anyone is using it as a search term to surface useful information.
SEO Difficulty
The SEO Difficulty is the estimated competition for a search. In other tools, this measurement may be called Keyword Difficulty (KD) or keyword competition. It's presented as a figure between one and 100; the higher the figure, the more competition. Any keyword with an SEO Difficulty of over 30 is going to be really hard to rank on, unless your content has a niche or novel focus, or unless you already have a well established website with lots of existing backlinks from other domains with great authority.
In Ubersuggest, it's made clear that this figure is an estimation for what it calls 'organic' searches. It is helpful to know that your keyword results here are for natural results only, and exclude findings that are derived from the paid traffic of online advertising. If paid results were mixed up in the SEO Difficulty findings, that would distort our estimation of the keyword's difficulty. And, just a tad soul-destroying.
Links
Links in Ubersuggest is a reference to backlinks. This figure tells us how many incoming links there are from other websites to your domain (backlinks). When you search for information on a keyword, you're given the results for that keyword as well as a long list of related keywords, keyword phrases and long-tailed keywords. Once you click on the Search Results for any one of them, you're presented with a Google Search Results list of the top 100 URLs that rank for that keyword. The Links column is found here.
This is one area in which the list display of Ubersuggest does users a great service because it enables us to compare and take disparities into account. For example, some of the URLs might have backlinks in the hundreds and thousands, but that might only account for one or two in the top ten – skewing the average. If these are disregarded, the average backlinks recommended to rank on this keyword might be closer to between one and three. Suddenly, that seems much more doable.
Domain Authority
This is a search engine ranking score (1-100) that reveals how likely a website is to rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs). It incorporates linking root domains and total number of links. It helps compare websites and benchmark their ranking strength progress.
Find out what the DA figure is for your own website. If it's much lower than those in the top ten for the same keyword, find another. If the websites of some of your competitors appear in the top ten, it's worth noting their DA count compared to yours. Remember, there are ways of increasing your website's DA rating that are worthwhile exploring.
Try it Out!
Ubersuggest has many more features, such as providing a Competitive Analysis and SEO Explorer. Also, while you can use the free version and get a small number of daily searches, as with most things worth having, we opted for a paid account. Highly recommended!
If you enjoyed this, you might want to check out On Page SEO: A Glossary of Jargon or How to Get Found on Search Engines Without Grinding Eye of Newt or Pricking Your Thumbs.
Allen