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In May, SEMRush changed its keyword difficulty. 

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is a metric that tells you how much SEO effort it might take to organically rank a page in the top 10 results on Google for a certain keyword. And overall with keyword difficulty, the higher the percentage is, the harder the competition will be.

They launched an infographic walking through how they now calculate KD which might be worth printing and putting on your wall.

The new calculation that takes into account the median # of backlinks & Authority Score PLUS the relative weight of the links and what the SERP looks like related to other SERP features.

From an inbound link perspective, it looks at:

• Median number of referring domains pointing to the URLs that are ranking.
• The median authority score of the domains that are ranking
• Median ratio of  ratio of follow no follow links pointing to the URLs that are ranking.

And then it takes into account the keyword itself. And in that case it looks at:

• The median number of referring domains for the ranking URLs.
• search volume 
• median follow no follow ratio for ranking URLs 
• featured snippet
• instant answer
• Whether the keyword is branded 
• local pack 
• Knowledge panel 
• top stories
• People also ask 
• sitelinks 
• the word count in the keyword 
• or whether the search result has no search features.

SEMRush then weights the score based on whether or not it's in a regional database to ensure that the data is not skewed by less populated countries with lower search volume. 

Now I recommend that nobody takes one of these measurements and runs with it in a vacuum for every keyword where you want to create a plan to rank you should actually take a look at the SERP results. I have found that for some Industries frankly the search results are whitelisted. In my experience, you discover the true lift around what it will take to rank for particular keywords once you do a competitive analysis. That competitive analysis should include finding out how many SEOs are working for the other brands with which you compete. For example,  I've had to tell Federal clients that they can't rank for particular topics because the other brands appearing in those search results have huge SEO teams.

So that's your SEO tip for today -  be aware that the keyword difficulty measurement in SEMRush has changed and plan accordingly to make sure your clients are aware.

Thanks for listening come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

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