Is there an ideal ratio of keyword difficulty to search volume?

[AdviceElle]

I used the keyword research tool to pull data on potential keywords, the report returns a percentage to represent the competition and difficulty of a keyword. Is there an ideal ratio of percent difficulty to search volume

[DougRoberts]

Google Webmaster tools will tell your the click through rate from the SERPS and Google Analytics can be used to measure the conversion rate. You'll need to define your site goal and think about how visitors move through your site from their landing page to your site goal pages.

[AdviceElle]

Thank you. Do you know of any good tools to measure the conversion rate or click thru rate of keyword?

[DougRoberts]

No, there's no ideal ratio as such and it's always a good idea to look beyond the headline numbers, especially the relevance of the pages being returned in the SERPS.

You're looking for good volumes of search traffic with as little competition as possible. While those large traffic numbers for highly competitive keywords may look attractive, you may be better off targeting less competitive keywords with smaller amounts of traffic.

Think of it this way a large slice of a small pie is going to be better than just crumbs from a large pie.

However there are other factors to consider beside just traffic and difficulty. You also need to think about user intent, relevance to content / brand / offering and once you start getting some traffic the conversion rate.

[SEODinosaur]

Competition difficulty level only shows sites on first pages SERPs. For example: If wiki is up there it throws the number off or just makes it look way more challenging.

Is there an ideal ratio of percent difficulty to search volume?

No there is not. There are plenty of keywords out there with huge traffic volume and no competition. For the most part profitable keywords are more challenging.