What are the best tools/methods to assess a keyword's difficulty in ranking for SEO?

I'm a fan of the SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool, but I also like to look at the quality of the results. I don't get too caught up in how many links it's going to take from PR 3 pages or any of that business...in my opinion, it's just the wrong area to focus. Instead, I look at: - Quality of results: Are the top-ranking sites good quality, professional? Do they look like something that's been worked on by a pro? Can I easily come up with something that's better than the content listed first overall, or is it going to take a lot of work to generate a page with better content? - Variety of results: Am I seeing multiple commercial sites trying to rank for this term, or am I seeing a commercial site, a directory page, an article from an article site, etc.? - CPC data: Are people bidding for this term? If so, how many? What are they willing to pay for a click? It's easy for me to get a sense of the challenge I face based on this analysis, and then I can set some reasonable expectations for my client. Combined with the score from the SEOMoz difficulty tool, I feel very confident estimating the amount of effort it will take to rank.

Colibri Tool (http://www.colibritool.com) does it all with style. It CAN track your competition (in narrow or wide spectrum), it CAN track page ranks up to 100 and it also CAN track the best back links of your site. A few people mentioned it before me and this trend should be stronger, because this tool is becoming more and more popular nowadays.

Ultimate Niche Finder is what I use for this. It allows me to measure not only a keyword's difficulty to rank but also measure TONS of keywords' difficulty at the same time. Most of the tools out there only allows you to measure a keyword's difficulty one by one which is obviously going to take a long amount of time to find the golden nugget keyword you've been looking for.

We've developed a proprietary algorithm to calculate a Competition Index score that helps quantify the difficulty of any keyword analyzed in our product, http://serpiq.com We've been doing regression testing by refining our algorithm against our fairly massive data set to tighten things up and have found our algorithm is accurate on nearly every keyword analyzed. Feel free to give it a spin for free!

There are several but some of the best keyword difficulty tool will include Google's tools, of course, SEOmoz, and Mozscape. However, people should not fully depend on tools and should learn to use more their knowledge and skills and learn to apply more hard work and initiative.

When we talk about Keyword Difficulty, what we really want to know isn't  "how difficult is this keyword?", it's "how difficult would it be for my website to rank for this keyword?" For example, "SEO" and "home loan" are both competitive keywords, but http://SEOBook.com will have an easy time ranking for SEO-related keywords and a tough time in finance, while for QuickenLoans.com it will be the opposite: So in order to find easy keywords specifically for your website, you might find it helpful to think more in terms of comparative competitive analysis: does my site have more quality links than the top rankers? is my content better optimized for the keyword? are my anchor texts more relevant? is my domain authority higher? is my website more of an authority on this topic? and so on, for each major ranking factor... PageRank and other link factors are certainly worth looking at, but that's only one small part of the picture, like trying to predict how wealthy someone is by the kind of car they drive: definitely some correlation, but far from perfect. The good news is that means it's not just about links anymore: do a good job in other areas and you can definitely outrank sites with higher PageRank than you! So, how can you get a more complete picture of keyword difficulty?Most experienced SEOs use some combination of data from specialized SEO tools and "gut feeling". If you're limited to free tools, your only option is manually checking each keyword using browser plugins such as SEOQuake.com, SEO for Firefox, and MozBar.  Most professional SEOs want to be able to do bulk analysis, get additional data, and not have to spend endless hours in excel, so they may spend the money on paid tools like https://moz.com/researchtools/keyword-difficulty, http://www.brightedge.com/competitive-seo-analysis/keyword-discovery, http://SEMRush.com, or my company's keyword difficulty tool https://www.canirank.com. Whatever you choose, the process is similar. For a few concrete examples of using an SEO competitive analysis process to assess keyword difficulty, here's a video you might find helpful: Finally, if you just want a single metric to measure the relative difficulty of a huge list of keywords, the answer is that no perfect solution exists, as modern search engines are far too complex. But there are several metrics you could use as a (very) rough proxy for keyword difficulty: Google AdWords CPC x Search Volume (free): not surprisingly, the commercial value of a keyword correlates reasonably well to it's difficulty. Google PageRank (free): no longer updated and most pros will tell you it's worthless, but in our study actually was a better predictor of keyword difficulty than many paid tools you'll find recommended here Moz Page Authority (paid): the second best predictor of keyword difficulty in our study, frequently updated CanIRank Ranking Probability (paid): the only metric to incorporate content and link factors on both the page and website level, which is about 2x more accurate than other approaches You should know however that using any one metric to assess keyword difficulty will give you only a small piece of the overall picture. In a study ranking the correlation of popular keyword difficulty tool metrics to Google search results, most scored worse than totally unrelated metrics like # of Facebook likes, and a few tools had about the same degree of correlation as a random number generator. You can see the complete study results here: http://www.canirank.com/blog/best-keyword-difficulty-metric/

We have just released http://SEOprofiler.com which also offers a keyword competiton tool: http://www.seoprofiler.com/keywords/competition You enter two keywords (to compare them), your website URL and select a Google variation. Within some seconds, you'll get keyword difficulty scores for both keywords. The difficulty score is calculated based on the top 5 search results for these keywords: number of unique backlinks to the found sites quality of the backlinks to the found sites number of search results optimization level (is the found website optimized for the keyword, i.e. does the keyword exist in the title, meta description, body text, etc.) The first three factors are weighted by search result position.

Hey,Let me make it short and simplified :)Choose your domain name similar to your product, so do fine search using Google Keyword tool and set your domain name. Which will be better possibility for search engine to understand that your domain and your product are much similar.So I use Google Search Operators with example below:Recently I wanted to write an article on new mobile http://bit.ly/aqua-mobile-review so did research using Google auto complete, then feed the long tail keywords into Google Keyword tool so that you know there is monthly average search of minimum 500 with cpc of USD1+ OR INR50+ so then  DO THE SEARCH for that longtail keyword if the search result is more than 10,00,000 in google search results then I would prefer to get another long tail keyword rather than wasting your hard work on this keyword.Use allintitle: result should be less than 1000use allinurl: result should be less than 1000use allintext: here the result should be lesser than 50% to search result for example 10,00,000 then allintext should give you result 500,000 or less than that then with proper using of meta description and head tags, alt tags your article can definitely rank in the first page within few weeks of time or even lesser time.Hope you got an brainstorming idea :)

In short you need some experience and an agile brain to get somewhere close to reliable results. Start off with doing an allintitle: search in Google (this will include results of anchor text links using that keyword pointing at the site) which will give you some idea of how many pages are actually optimized for that key phrase, so you know how many serious competitors you have. Then look at the top ten search results for  that key phrase and use your favorite method of determining how many links each of those sites has. This will give you a rough indication of how much linking you will need to know and will often reveal niches where pages have attained first page rankings with a small number of links.