Free Keyword Difficulty Checker
Most checkers give you a score and leave you to guess what it means for you. Paste your keywords and your domain, and see how many people search each one, how hard it is, and whether a site your size can rank for it.
How it works
A difficulty score means nothing until you know whose site it is for.
Paste your keywords
Up to 10 at a time, one a line. Pick the country you want to rank in.
Add your domain
Optional. We size your site by the visits it already gets from Google, so the verdict is for you and not for an average site.
Write the ones you can win
Each keyword comes back with its searches, its difficulty, and a plain verdict: easy to rank, within reach, or hard for now.
Need keywords to check? Map a topic with the keyword clustering tool, then schedule the ones you can win with the content plan generator.
Frequently asked questions
Is the keyword difficulty checker free?
Yes. You can run 5 checks a day with no account, and 20 a day when you sign in with Google, with up to 10 keywords in each. No credit card required. Every check reads paid search data, so the tool also has a daily total it shares between everyone; on a busy day it asks you to come back tomorrow.
What is keyword difficulty?
A score from 0 to 100 for how hard it is to reach Google's first page for a search. It is worked out from the pages that rank there today, mostly from how many other sites link to them. The higher the score, the stronger the pages you would have to beat.
What is a good keyword difficulty?
It depends on your site, which is why a single score is not much use on its own. A new site with almost no visits from Google can expect to rank for keywords up to about 15. A site with a steady trickle of search traffic can reach about 30, and an established one about 45. Add your domain and the tool tells you which of those you are.
How do you decide whether my site can rank?
We estimate how many visits your domain gets from Google in a month and compare that with the difficulty of each keyword. It is the same rule SiteSeed uses when it plans articles for a customer's site. The thresholds are our working estimates, not a guarantee: a verdict says where your odds are best, not that a page will rank.
Where do the numbers come from?
From DataForSEO, a commercial keyword database: the average monthly searches over the last twelve months, and its difficulty score. Search volumes from any tool are estimates, and two tools rarely agree to the digit. Use them to compare keywords with each other.
Why does a keyword show no data?
The database has no record of it, which usually means very few people search it in that country. That is not always bad: a specific question your customers ask can be worth an article even when no tool can count it.
What do I do with the result?
Write the keywords marked easy to rank first, add one or two that are within reach, and leave the hard ones until your site has grown. To turn the winners into a schedule, use the content plan generator, or let SiteSeed find and write them for you.