Keyword Difficulty Checker

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Estimate SEO keyword difficulty in bulk from live Google SERP signals — and surface your easiest ranking opportunities first.

Drop in a list of keywords and get back a 0–100 difficulty score for each, based on what's actually ranking on Google right now: how many high-authority sites hold the top 10, how optimized their titles are, how many ads and SERP features crowd the page, and how concentrated the domains are.

🔑 Setup in 60 seconds: get a free SerpApi key (100 SERP lookups/month free), paste it into serpApiKey, add keywords, and run.

What it does

For each keyword, the Actor pulls the live Google SERP (via SerpApi) and computes a transparent difficulty estimate from observable signals:

These combine into a 0–100 difficulty score and a plain-English rating (very easy → very hard) with a recommended action.

Why it's honest

This is a SERP-based estimate, not a backlink-based metric like Ahrefs/SEMrush KD. It answers "how contested and well-optimized is this SERP?" — which is exactly what you can observe without proprietary link data. Every weight is in plain code in src/difficulty.ts:

difficulty = authority*0.35+ titleOptimization*0.25+ serpFeatures*0.15
+ ads*0.15+ domainConcentration*0.10(clamped 0–100)

No black box. Tune the weights to your niche if you want.

Who it's for

• Content & SEO teams — prioritize the keywords you can actually rank for.
• Bloggers & affiliates — find low-competition "easy win" topics.
• Agencies — bulk-qualify a client's keyword list before committing hours.
• PPC marketers — gauge commercial competition (ad density) per term.

Popular SEO use cases

• Easy-win keyword finder - sort large keyword lists by low difficulty and clear recommended action.
• Affiliate keyword qualification - check buyer-intent keywords before writing reviews or comparison pages.
• SaaS content prioritization - compare solution, alternative, and "best software" SERPs.
• Local SEO difficulty checks - estimate competition for city + service keywords.
• eCommerce category planning - score product, category, and modifier keywords before building pages.
• Agency keyword audits - turn client keyword exports into a transparent opportunity report.

Input

One SERP lookup is consumed per keyword.

Example input

{
"keywords":["best coffee maker","ai seo tools","how to start a blog"],
"geo":"US",
"language":"en",
"serpApiKey":"@SERPAPI_KEY"
}

More in examples/.

Output

One dataset row per keyword:

{
"keyword":"ai seo tools",
"difficultyScore":64,
"difficultyLabel":"hard",
"authorityScore":70,
"titleOptimizationScore":80,
"serpFeatureScore":50,
"adsScore":100,
"domainConcentrationScore":10,
"highAuthorityCount":7,
"exactTitleMatches":8,
"uniqueDomains":9,
"adsCount":4,
"hasFeaturedSnippet":true,
"peopleAlsoAskCount":4,
"topDomains":["hubspot.com","semrush.com","..."],
"recommendedAction":"Hard — only with strong domain authority and link building.",
"source":"serpapi-google",
"error":null
}

Key-value store outputs

• EASY_WINS — your lowest-difficulty keywords (the money output)
• SUMMARY — counts by rating, average difficulty, easiest + hardest
• ERRORS — any failed lookups

Limitations & honesty

• This is a SERP-signal estimate, not a backlink-authority score. Treat it as directional.
• Results vary by geo and language — a keyword can be easy in one market, hard in another.
• The authority-domain list is curated + TLD heuristics (.gov/.edu); it won't recognize every strong niche site.
• One SerpApi lookup per keyword — mind your monthly quota on big lists.

Related tools

• Google Autocomplete Keyword Scraper — discover the keywords to check here.
• Google Trends Keyword Monitor — see which of them are rising.
• Google Trends Content Calendar Generator — schedule the winners.

A natural workflow: discover (Autocomplete) → qualify (this) → prioritize (Trends) → schedule (Calendar).

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.