6 vital lenses for effective keyword research

4. The competitive landscape’s relative strength

Keyword difficulty lies.

Not some of the time, but all of the time, across pretty much every single keyword research tool.

This means simply adding a filter for KD when doing keyword research isn’t good enough.

At best, it sets you up for bad expectations. At worst, it manifests in “pretty good” future rankings that never will actually break the bank (in a good way).

See, “keyword difficulty” usually relates specifically to the number (not even quality!) of backlinks to each individual piece of content currently ranking in the top ten or so.

However, it does not only ignore the quality of said backlinks but also the overall domain strength of the site.

Check out this “localization issues” example below to see what I mean:

Nice! We SEOs like “Easy,” right?

Except, this:

Sure, the two green boxes (page-level strength) are kinda/sorta easy.

However, the red box? Domain strength overall? With one exception, the rest are sitting at 70+ domain ratings.

So no. This keyword isn’t “easy.”

This is why filtering a spreadsheet for “low KD” is misleading and inaccurate.

5. Your site’s current strengths

Topical authority can work practically in two ways:

• It can be a rising tide that lifts all boats (err, other similar keywords in the same space you’re deemed an expert), or…
• It can be a glass ceiling, giving you the dreaded “pretty good” rankings that never actually come to fruition (without a ton of extra work in other areas.

The simplest way to assess topical authority (or lack thereof) is to see if you have good rankings (top five or 10, at least) for lots of related content around these same queries.

Wanna see what that looks like? Kinda like this:

Tons of top five rankings for related keywords around “live streaming.” Great!

But the inverse is true, too.

No strong rankings for other related topics or concepts? This means you have a lot more work to do!

Take a look at this pillar page below and specifically the sub-sections being called out:

Now, let’s assess each area to see if this site already has good rankings for those sections.

Example 1: A single 12th position, so not really.

Example 2: Two 60+ positions – not at all!

Example 3: Lots of 40-80+ positions. So clearly, no.

The point?

That first pillar page will always struggle to rank until you can also get these other supporting pages to help, you know, actually support it!

In other words, there is no existing topical authority in this space. Creating and reinforcing this should be priority number one.

And yet? No Excel sheet or formula is going to tell you this. At least, not without analyzing the problem of not ranking from different perspectives or angles like this.

6. Resources you’re able to allocate in a specific time frame

Let’s recap and combine the first five ideas. Then, add a sixth consideration: how many resources (i.e., people, time, money) you can realistically allocate to each keyword you might want to target over the next year.

Once again, back to “live streaming platform.”

Take a peek at both the domain and page-level strengths below:

Now, an important caveat:

• You’ll notice the huge number of referring domains (in the right-hand orange box).
• That’s why this KD was listed as “Super Hard” earlier.
• But, those of you with eagle eyes will now see that the ones with thousands or tens of thousands of referring domains are actually homepages!
• This means that “Super Hard” ranking earlier is also overstated.
• Ahrefs is simply averaging out these tens of thousands of domains across the other results, too.
• If search intent is truly a comparison post, it will mean that you don’t need nearly as many links to actually rank for this query.

Confused yet?

Yes, this keyword is still pretty difficult. Don’t get it twisted.

But it’s not nearly as difficult or unattainable as that KD would have originally alluded to.

Once again, no Excel formulas would have helped you uncover this issue. Only your eyes, ears and experience can.

This is one of the many reasons why brands routinely fail at link building. When you see “1,000+” backlinks needed, you build tons and tons of cheap, low-quality links.

Yet, you’d probably be better off with better content, topical authority and fewer (dozens to hundreds) of really high-quality, editorial-based links instead.

Yes, you still need relevance and scale either way.

The type of campaigns and, therefore, the effective budget required for this one URL (compared to all the other URLs you might be juggling) should also be completely different.

A smarter, more intentional keyword research approach

Let’s face it:

SEOs are kinda geeky. We love data and want to live in a world of logic.

We believe everything we do is quantifiable and data-driven. But don’t take this way too far.

You don’t need fancy formulas and pivot tables when doing keyword research. The more data sets you’re juggling often lead you astray.

SEO is more art than pure science in this regard.

What’s hard about SEO is reading the tea leaves and then consistently executing over the long haul (read: 24+ months, minimum).

None of these can be answered by ChatGPT, Ahrefs, etc., with a simple prompt or export button.

This is why people and companies fail at SEO.

Not because “SEO is difficult/technical/doesn’t work in my space/enter other excuses here.”