Get a fast, honest difficulty read for any keyword by combining two of Google's most powerful operators: intitle: (how many pages target the exact phrase) and inurl: (how many have it in the URL).
Keyword difficulty is an estimate of how much SEO effort you'll need to crack the top 10 for a query. Paid tools score it 0–100 based on referring-domain counts of the top results. A free, intuitive shortcut is to count how many pages explicitly optimise for the phrase — both in their title tag and in their URL slug. The intersection of those two signals correlates closely with how 'serious' the SERP is.
Type your keyword and the tool opens a Google search combining intitle:"your keyword" inurl:your-keyword. The result count at the top is your difficulty signal. Under 50,000 typically means an easy win for a well-built page; over 1,000,000 signals a saturated SERP dominated by established brands. Look at the top 10 pages: if they're all DR 80+ household names, plan a long-tail attack instead.
Use it before greenlighting a new content piece, when triaging a backlog of keyword ideas, or when comparing two competing topics for the same monthly slot. It's also useful for justifying topic decisions to clients or stakeholders — the raw Google number is harder to argue with than a black-box difficulty score.
Combine the difficulty number with a manual look at the top 5: are they tutorials, lists, product pages, news, or video? The format you need to publish is dictated by what's already winning. Pages older than 18 months in the top 5 are a strong opportunity — fresh, comprehensive content tends to displace stale incumbents.
It's directionally similar. Ahrefs uses backlinks; this tool uses targeting density. For most decisions, the conclusion is the same.
Under 100,000 combined intitle+inurl results is usually achievable with one well-built page. Under 10,000 is often a quick win.
No. Plan a year-long campaign of supporting long-tail content that flows authority into your hard target. Hard keywords are how you eventually win — not how you start.
Explore more keyword tools on the tool hub — or jump straight to the Keyword Position Checker, Keyword Density Checker, Keyword Research Tool.