Keyword research
Identifying and prioritising the queries a business should target, using volume, difficulty, intent, business value and current visibility.
ContentKDCompetition score
Keyword difficulty
A vendor-specific 0-100 score estimating how hard it is to rank on page one for a query, usually derived from the link profiles of current top results.
In full
Every tool computes difficulty differently, so scores are not comparable across vendors and none is a Google metric. Because most models weight backlinks heavily, they systematically misjudge queries where intent match, brand, freshness or site type is the real barrier. Difficulty is most useful as a coarse sort within one tool, combined with a manual look at who actually ranks and whether a site of your type appears at all.
Example
A query scored 12/100 proves unwinnable because all ten results are government and university pages.
Related terms
Search volume
The estimated number of times a query is searched in a period, usually derived from Google Ads data and modelled by third-party tools.
Third-party authority metrics
Vendor-calculated 0-100 scores estimating a domain's link strength — Ahrefs DR, Moz DA, Semrush Authority Score, Majestic Trust Flow —…
SERP
The page a search engine returns for a query, combining organic results with ads, rich results, AI-generated answers and vertical modules.
Share of voice
The proportion of available search visibility a site captures across a defined keyword set, weighting positions by expected click-through…