Checking keyword difficulty is going nowhere

What helped me was calibrating against my own site. Pull the keywords you already rank top ten for, note what difficulty the tool gives them, and that's roughly your ceiling right now. Anything well above it goes on the later list. The number means a lot more once you've anchored it to something real.

it probably is going nowhere, and that is partly the metric's fault. every tool has its own difficulty score, they are not the same number, and most of them are largely a measure of links pointing at whatever currently ranks. so it is useful for sorting a list of two thousand into some kind of order, and close to useless for deciding on one keyword. sort with it, then decide by opening the results and reading them.