keyword scoring & page ranking help

Hi all,

I’m building a small internal SEO tool for myself for a few projects of mine (= not selling or promoting anything here)

I’m doing this because the usual SEO tools are abit too expensive for my use case, and also more complex than I need (but mostly for the fun of it)

I want a bit simpler and straightforward workflow:

• brainstorm seed phrases with an AI tool (Openai API)
• expand them via Google Ads API: search volume averages, pricing, competition score
• estimate which keywords are realistic for our domain in a specific market/language
• pick the best ones to work on now
• generate article ideas from those keywords
• later turn them into properly structured SEO articles

The part I’m stuck on is keyword competition scoring:

I’m not looking for a perfect SEO difficulty metric, just want something practical that helps to answer: can my site realistically compete for this keyword in a given market and language, and is it worth working on now? (similar to semrush etc scores I guess)

For each selected key phrase:

• estimate expected CTR for rank 1, 3, and 5
• reduce it depending on SERP features like AI Overview, ads, featured snippet, PAA, etc.
• adjust it a bit by intent, because those SERP features seem to affect informational and commercial queries differently

For competition webpages, I use only domain-level authority for now, with OpenPageRank as a rough proxy. I’m not sure if there are better free alternatives for this part.

Then I compare the domains already ranking in Google against our own domain, and add a small advantage if we already rank somewhere for that keyword in Search Console.

So the rough idea is:

opportunity = expected CTR at target rank / ranking difficulty

The opportunity score is just a derived number that I later map into simple tiers like “go for it”, “consider”, “long shot”, etc.

A real example from my tool right now is “crm for photographers” for the US market, English language.

It has about 260 searches/month.

Let’s say the SERP currently has no AI Overview, no featured snippet, no ads, but PAA is present.

• adventureinstead [3.0]
• kylegoldie [2.5]
• reddit [8.0 → discounted to 2.4 - purely empirical]
• getsproutstudio [3.4]
• honeybook [4.9]
• monday [5.8]

Considering the competition pages ranks from OpenPagerank, my tool currently estimates roughly:

Rank 1: ~50 clicks/month, opportunity 18.0

Rank 3: ~20 clicks/month, opportunity 6.8

Rank 5: ~13 clicks/month, opportunity 3.5

the scale is approximately this (just for reference, dont want to get into the whole calculus on how:

• 0–10 = weak / very speculative / pass
• 10–40 = possible, but more of a long shot
• 40–100 = decent candidate
• 100+ = strong candidate / go for it

So in this case it says rank 1 is the best target, but overall the keyword is still only a long shot.

———

One thing I’m still unsure about is whether using only domain-level authority for this kind of first-pass scoring is good enough, or whether that makes the whole thing too naive.

I know this leaves out a lot on purpose, like page-level links, content depth, topical authority, freshness, and brand strength.

Does this direction sound reasonable for a rough internal keyword triage tool?

I’d especially love feedback on whether this logic makes sense at all, whether domain-level authority is enough for a first pass, and what you would change without making it much more complex?

submitted by /u/greedy_tourist
[link] [comments]

from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/OXKjCZc