What Affects Keyword Competition? Start by Separating SEO from Ad Competition

To assess keyword competition, first distinguish between two things: how difficult it is to earn a top ranking in organic search, and how intensely advertisers compete in paid search. Organic competition mainly depends on the strength, content, and backlinks of pages already ranking. Paid competition depends on the advertisers bidding and the keyword’s commercial value. Search volume, industry, and revenue potential may affect both, but low ad competition does not mean that ranking organically will be easy.

Organic Search: How Strong Are the Top-Ranking Competitors?

Assessing SEO difficulty requires more than looking at how many people search for a term. Semrush explains that its Keyword Difficulty metric, KD%, analyzes the top ten organic results, considering factors such as backlinks and the authority of ranking domains. This is a tool’s estimate, not a ranking formula published by Google.

• Links and website strength: Top-ranking pages with many high-quality backlinks are generally harder to outrank.
• Content competition: Review the depth and completeness of content in the first page of search results. This approach has also been suggested on PTT, but it is a research recommendation—not a claim that writing a longer article will guarantee success.
• Your own website: Ranking for the same keyword may be harder for some websites than others. Semrush’s PKD% estimates ranking difficulty for a specific domain.

Search Volume and Commercial Value: Low-Volume Terms Can Still Be Highly Competitive

High-volume keywords generally attract more websites competing for rankings, but search volume is not the only criterion. Keywords that can generate orders or leads may face strong competition even when searched less frequently. The level of competition within an industry also affects your choice of keywords.

Long-tail keywords are not necessarily easy to rank for, either. Semrush notes that longer, more specific terms generally have lower search volume and less competition. However, word count matters less than other factors, and even long-tail terms are highly competitive in some industries. Assess search intent and existing search results together, rather than simply choosing longer, lower-volume terms.

As part of Procrustes’s content services, we turn the questions our clients genuinely care about into articles, with ongoing planning, writing, and updates.

Estimating Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Competition: Assess Competition Metrics and Click Costs Separately

When screening PPC keywords, first set your target location, then compare ad competition, search volume, and estimated cost per click (CPC). Semrush’s Competitive Density expresses ad competition on a scale from 0 to 1, with values closer to 1 indicating stronger competition. It uses a different scale from KD%, which measures organic ranking difficulty.

Commercial intent can also provide useful context. A 2024 Semrush article used “credit cards” and “credit score” as examples, with CPCs at the time of $7.31 and $1.64, respectively. The author attributed the difference to “credit cards” being more likely to generate demand for services, while “credit score” was more focused on finding information. These are examples from that article, not fixed prices, and they do not establish that all informational keywords are inexpensive.

CPC helps you estimate costs; it does not replace an assessment of organic ranking difficulty. It changes with competition, and the values shown by tools reflect conditions at a particular time. Even when a keyword has relatively low ad competition, examine its top-ranking organic pages separately to avoid confusing the two types of competition.