Keyword Difficulty
Keyword difficulty is a tool-generated score, usually 0 to 100, estimating how hard it would be to rank on page one for a given term. It is calculated mainly from the backlink profiles of the pages currently ranking for it.
Why it matters for your rankings
Difficulty scores are useful for triage and dangerous as gospel. They tell you roughly how much link authority the incumbents have, which is genuinely helpful when prioritising a list of five hundred candidate terms.
What they cannot see is relevance, content quality or intent match. A term scored 60 can be winnable if the ranking pages are all outdated and generic, while a term scored 20 can be unwinnable if the top results are Amazon and Wikipedia. Scores also ignore your own authority entirely: difficulty 40 is trivial for an established domain and impossible for a site launched last month. Read the actual results page before trusting any number.
How to check it on your site
Use it to sort, not to decide
Rank your keyword list by difficulty, then manually review the top candidates before committing.
Inspect the actual SERP
Look at who ranks. If page one is dominated by marketplaces and Wikipedia, the score understates the real difficulty.
Compare against your own authority
A term is realistic if your Domain Rating is within range of the pages currently ranking for it.
Look for weak incumbents
Outdated content, thin pages or forum threads in the top five signal an opportunity the score will not reflect.