Backlinks are a known ranking factor.
Keyword Difficulty (KD) takes the quantity of links to the top-ranking pages into account, but not their quality. So it’s worth checking the backlink profiles of the top-ranking pages before targeting a keyword. You’ll often find that although a page has lots of websites linking to it, many are low-quality—in which case it might be easier to outrank the page than you initially thought.
For example, look at the first couple of results for “best home printer”—which has a KD score of 60:
It initially looks like quite a hard keyword to crack because the top-ranking page has links from lots of websites. But if we check its backlinks in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, most of them are low-quality and nofollowed.
If you can match search intent and your website is authoritative enough, you probably won’t need that many high-quality links to outrank this page.
PRO TIP
Even if ranking for a keyword seems difficult, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be targeting it. You just need to be realistic and divide keywords into long, medium, and short-term targets.
How to do a page-level keyword competitive analysis
Running a keyword competitive analysis at the page level (instead of domain level) can help you find gaps in existing content. This is where your page fails to cover something that searchers might want to know. Filling these gaps can help you to:
Rank for more long-tail keywords
Rank higher for your main keyword
For example, if we look at the top results for the keyword “guest blogging,” most of them feature a definition.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Unfortunately, we didn’t include this in our guide to guest blogging. Unless we fill that ‘gap’, we’re unlikely to rank high for our main target keyword. And we certainly won’t rank for long-tails like “what is guest blogging” because our post doesn’t answer the question.
But before you can fix gaps in existing content, you need to find them… and you can do that using roughly the same process as above. The difference being that you run the analysis at the page level instead.
So the first step is to find competing pages in one of two ways:
Search Google for your target keyword.The top-ranking pages are your competitors.
Use the “Traffic share by pages” report in Keywords Explorer. Enter a few keywords, then hit “By pages” in the “Traffic share” section on the left menu.
From there, plug a few competing URLs into the Content Gap tool and make sure the mode is set to “URL.” Remove your site from the bottom and leave it blank (you tend to get better results this way).