Search Volume and Trends
Kwestify uses data from Google’s API to display some of the SEO results within Kwestify. These results are updated as soon as Google provides the data.
- Search volume: The average number of times people search for a keyword and similar terms based on the month range and location. This information shows how popular your keywords are during different times of the year. This range is averaged over a 12-month period. We suggest to review the “Search Trend” graph to identify keywords that are increasing in search volume or decreasing based on each month of the year.
- Average cost per click: This shows an estimated average CPC amount for Search Network ad campaigns.
- 3 month change: This shows how much the keywords search volume has changed over the last 3 months.
- Search trend: Get a glimpse of estimated search volume for each month over the past 12 months. This will also show you if the keyword is increasing in search volume, decreasing, or remaining about the same.
Some data may show as N/A. This simply means that Google has not got enough data to provide these results. This data will be updated if more content is created on these search terms and more searches are performed.
Keyword Competition and Difficulty
The “Competition” and “Difficulty” columns are very similar, but give you a quick view of whether the keyword(s) may be easy or difficult to rank. The higher the number, the more difficult the keyword should be to rank. The lower the number, the less difficult the keyword may be to rank.
While we use a calculation to help determine this (as shown below), keep in mind that Google uses hundreds of elements to help determine the results in SERPS and their placements. This should only be used as a general guide to help you better understand if the keywords/niche you’re targeting is too competitive. Even low competition keywords may require more effort to rank based on the authority of your website and many other factors.
Kwestify uses different signals to try to give a reasonable keyword competition calculation. This should help you better decide on which keywords may be the easiest to rank for.
Keyword Difficulty Calculation
- To calculate keyword difficulty, we first collect the top 10 websites that rank organically for the keyword on the first page of Google.
- The first domain is given a ranking score and the score for its page ranking for the keyword. These scores are based on the number of backlinks pointing to the domain and its page. They range from 0 (no backlinks detected) to 1,000 (highest rank).
- The domain rank is multiplied by 0.1, and the page rank is multiplied by 0.9. The resulting values are added and then divided by 500. ((domain rank * 0.1) + (page rank * 0.9)) / 500.
- The same calculation is performed for each of the ten domains and their pages.
- The domains are sorted by rank value in ascending order and is given the median value.
- 0.2 is subtracted from the median. The resulting value is divided by 0.8 (median value – 0.2) / 0.8
- The resulting value is multiplied by 100 to convert it to an integer (e.g., 0.6 * 100 = 60). If the value is greater than 1, it’s truncated to 1.
- Keyword difficulty is a country-specific metric. SERPs may vary significantly depending on the location where the search session is initiated.