Keyword difficulty is a metric that measures how hard it would be to rank in Google’s top 10 organic (unpaid) results for a specific keyword. It is expressed as a percentage from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater difficulty in ranking for that keyword. Keyword difficulty is important to understand because it can help you make informed decisions in the content planning and keyword research process of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. By understanding keyword difficulty, you can find the sweet spot between super competitive keywords that are out of reach and low-competition keywords that don’t get any searches. This can help you pick the right keywords for your site, those that bring a good amount of organic traffic but don’t require too much effort. Factors that determine keyword difficulty include domain authority, page authority, content quality, and the number of websites linking to the top-ranking pages for that keyword. Different SEO tools calculate keyword difficulty differently, so it is important to understand how exactly the ranking difficulty is calculated by your SEO tool of choice.