Free Keyword Difficulty Checker
A 0 to 100 difficulty score for any keyword, estimated from Google's live top 10. Every signal is shown, no black-box numbers, and you get easier keyword ideas with it.
- 100% free
- No sign-up
- Live Google data
How it works
How to check keyword difficulty with this tool
Enter the keyword and market
Type the keyword as people search it and pick the country. The tool fetches the live Google top 10 for that market, the same list your page would have to break into.
Read the score and the signals
You get a 0 to 100 score with the three signals behind it: how many mega-sites hold the top 10, how tightly the titles are optimised for the keyword, and whether homepages or deep articles are ranking.
Pick a keyword you can win
Use the easier variants from Google autocomplete, check your position for the keyword in the SERP checker, and find the questions to answer with the People Also Ask tool.
What the keyword difficulty score means
| Score | Band | What it usually takes |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 20 | Very easy | A well-targeted page on a site a few months old can rank. No mega-sites in the top 10. |
| 21 to 40 | Easy | A focused page with solid on-page SEO and a handful of internal links. |
| 41 to 60 | Medium | A thorough page, consistent publishing on the topic and some links from other sites. |
| 61 to 80 | Hard | An established site with real authority in the topic, plus a page that beats the current top 10. |
| 81 to 100 | Very hard | Dominated by household names or government sites. Target a longer, more specific keyword instead. |
The score is an estimate from public SERP signals, not from a backlink index, so treat it as directional: within about 15 points of the paid tools for most keywords. The breakdown under the score tells you why a keyword is hard, which is more useful than the number itself when you are choosing between two keywords. For the full method, including how to compare scores across Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz, read our guide on how to check keyword difficulty.
Once you have picked a keyword, the page still has to be written or improved to compete with the top 10. To hand that work over, see our SEO services for small businesses; prices for the one-off audit and the monthly plan are on the pricing page.
FAQ
Keyword Difficulty Checker questions, answered
How is the score calculated?
Three signals from the top-10 SERP: mega-site presence (max 50 points: sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, GOV.UK that are nearly impossible to outrank), title-keyword match rate (max 30 points: a heavily optimised SERP is harder to break into) and URL depth (max 20 points: homepages dominating means brand-heavy, deep article URLs means content-driven and easier).
What is a keyword difficulty score or index?
A number, usually 0 to 100, that estimates how hard it is to rank in Google's top 10 for a keyword. Low scores mean a focused page on a modest site can rank; high scores mean the results are held by household names. Every tool builds its index differently, so compare bands (easy, medium, hard) rather than exact numbers.
Why does this differ from Moz or Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty?
Moz and Ahrefs use Domain Rating / Page Authority, which they compute from their proprietary backlink indexes. We do not have access to those datasets, so we use public SERP signals instead. Expect our score to land within ±15 points of the paid tools for most queries: directional, not gospel.
What does "Very Easy" actually mean?
A SERP with no mega-sites in the top 10, a low title-keyword match rate (suggesting the competition has not optimised), and high URL depth (deep article pages, not brand homepages). A 6-12 month old domain with a well-targeted page can realistically break in.
Can I bulk-check keywords?
Not in this tool. Each check uses one query against the Serper.dev Google SERP API. Stack the queries by checking 10-20 keywords manually within your daily 20-query budget. Bulk checking would burn the 2,500 free Serper credits very quickly.
Where do the "suggested easier keywords" come from?
Google Suggest autocomplete, the same source as the People Also Ask Finder. We surface 5 longer-tail variants on the assumption that they are typically easier than the seed term. We do not compute a difficulty score for each because that would burn 5 extra Serper queries per check.
Why might the score under- or over-estimate difficulty?
Three known blind spots: we do not see backlink data (a 10-year-old domain with massive authority but a shallow page will rank harder than our score suggests); we do not detect SERP intent shifts (informational vs commercial); and our mega-site list is finite (industry-specific giants we have not catalogued will under-count). Use the breakdown to sanity-check the score against your domain knowledge.
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