Usability Adjustment 1: Keyword Matching
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 4:18 am
A keyword research tool doesn’t do you much good if it can’t provide results for the keywords you’re researching. Plain and simple, we can’t consider two tools equal if their level of practical functionality isn’t the same.
To explain in practical terms, if a tool doesn't have data for a particular keyword, one of two things will happen:
You have to use another tool to get the data, which defeats the whole point of using the original tool.
You miss out on the opportunity to rank for high- tunisia number data keywords.
Neither scenario is good, so we developed a penalty system. For every 10% match rate below 100%, we deducted one point from the final score, up to a maximum deduction of 5 points. For example, if a tool matched 92% of keywords, we would deduct .8 points from the final score.
One could argue that this penalty is actually too lenient given the importance of the two non-ideal scenarios mentioned above.
The penalties are as follows:
Please note that we gave SEMrush a lot of leeway, in that technically, many of the keywords were not vetted in its keyword difficulty tool, but rather through manual digging through the phrase match tool. We’ll give them a pass, but with a stern warning!
To explain in practical terms, if a tool doesn't have data for a particular keyword, one of two things will happen:
You have to use another tool to get the data, which defeats the whole point of using the original tool.
You miss out on the opportunity to rank for high- tunisia number data keywords.
Neither scenario is good, so we developed a penalty system. For every 10% match rate below 100%, we deducted one point from the final score, up to a maximum deduction of 5 points. For example, if a tool matched 92% of keywords, we would deduct .8 points from the final score.
One could argue that this penalty is actually too lenient given the importance of the two non-ideal scenarios mentioned above.
The penalties are as follows:
Please note that we gave SEMrush a lot of leeway, in that technically, many of the keywords were not vetted in its keyword difficulty tool, but rather through manual digging through the phrase match tool. We’ll give them a pass, but with a stern warning!