When you are planning your SEO approach, pay attention to keyword difficulty.

Find out more about keyword difficulty in this

What is keyword difficulty?

It's a fancy way of saying, how competitive and difficult is it to rank for a search term.

For example "gift ideas" is more difficult to rank for than "Canadian made gift ideas for 2021".

You can learn more about keyword research in this free course by @semrush: https://www.semrush.com/academy/courses/competitive-analysis-and-keyword-research-course

Leveraging keyword difficulty for keyword planning is key. Using tools like (semrush and ahrefs) can help you determine the difficulty of a particular keyword and if it's worth pursuing.

Paid tools are better but free tools will also do the trick!

How to select a keyword

Selecting the right keyword is a balancing act. In order to maximize success, consider both the difficulty and the search volume for that particular keyword.

There could be a variation that has similar volume and lower difficulty.

Use long-tail keywords

Utilizing long-tail keywords may also be beneficial when doing keyword planning.

Long-tail keywords can help clients with a more targetted approach and can lead to better results due to the lower keyword difficulty.

How we do it

My team at Clio Websites utilizes semrush for identifying keywords.

We find that the paid SEO tools provide a more accurate keyword difficulty calculation. We avoid pursuing anything over a score of 60% which is considered difficult.