Find Your Difficulty Benchmark

This workflow will help you to identify a benchmark Difficulty metric for your site in Keyword Explorer to help with your keyword research. If you need more information about the Difficulty metric itself, please see our keyword metrics guide.

A site's Difficulty benchmark is the Difficulty score you can expect that site to compete in the short term. To find your optimum Difficulty score you'll want to gather up and assess keywords that site is already ranking for.

With Ranking Keywords and Keyword Lists in Moz's Keyword Explorer you can find a site's Difficulty benchmark in a few steps:

1. Head to Keyword Explorer and enter a domain, subdomain or page into Keyword Explorer
2. Click on Ranking Keywords
3. Filter Ranking and Volume, perhaps you only want to see keywords ranking on page 1 with a certain amount of Volume
4. Select the top checkbox
5. Click Add To...
6. Select Keyword List, select an existing list or create a new one to store your keywords.

If you have a lot of ranking keywords you can also Export to CSV and upload this file directly to a Keyword List in Keyword Explorer.

At this point you can add more keywords you may have stashed away that you've gathered as part of your research. Add these to your Keyword List.

To view the Difficulty benchmark for the keywords in this list, follow these steps:

1. Open your Keyword List
2. Once the data for your list has populated check out the accumulative Difficulty score at the top of the list, this is your Difficulty benchmark
3. Compare the Difficulty of keywords you’re already ranking for with the Difficulty of keywords and lists you want to rank for
4. Prioritize keywords you expect to see results for short-term
5. Keep higher Difficulty keywords in your pocket, and use them as part of your long-term strategy