Keyword Difficulty Checker

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: supply your SerpApi key in the secret serpApiKey field, add keywords, and run. Provider quotas and charges are separate from Actor event fees.

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What it does

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

Signal	What it measures
Authority	Share of the top 10 held by high-authority domains (Wikipedia, Amazon, Forbes, .gov/.edu, …)
Title optimization	Share of top-10 titles containing your exact keyword
SERP features	Featured snippet + People-Also-Ask boxes that push organic results down
Ads	Number of paid results (commercial competition)
Domain concentration	How few unique domains control the top 10

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
keywords	string[]	—	Keywords to check
keywordsText	string	—	Keywords as text (one per line / comma-separated)
serpApiKey	string (secret)	—	Required. Free key from serpapi.com
geo	string	"US"	Google country code
language	string	"en"	Language code
maxKeywords	integer	100	Max keywords to process
requestDelayMs	integer	500	Delay between lookups
maxConcurrency	integer	3	Parallel lookups

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/.

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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

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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.

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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).

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Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

Pricing and billing

Base result price checked September 14, 2026: $1.00 per 1,000 dataset items ($0.001 each). 100 result items cost $0.10 in result fees.

The separate Actor start event is $0.00005 per billable start unit, with one unit per GB of configured memory and a minimum of one. It applies even when a run returns no results.

Each keyword report is a dataset item. Scores are heuristic estimates, not a ranking guarantee. SerpApi credentials and any provider charges are separate.

The live Pricing tab is authoritative for current rates, tier discounts and any separately charged usage. Set a maximum run charge and inspect a small sample before scaling. Charges from an external provider, where used, are not controlled by the Apify run-charge limit.