Low SEO difficulty but high number of backlinks required? (Ubersuggest)

Question

I have recently started using Ubersuggest, and while doing keyword research, I noticed that certain keywords are set quite a low SEO difficulty (indicating that it is not too difficult to rank organically with these keywords); and yet, they also say that a huge number of backlinks are required to rank in the top 10 for these keywords.

For example, the keyword 'internet retail' has an SEO difficulty of 20, even with the word 'easy' next to it, but they also say "The average web page that ranks in the top 10 has 707 backlinks and a domain authority of 70".

That doesn't seem to make sense, because if you need up to 707 backlinks to compete with currently high ranking pages, surely the SEO difficulty must be much higher? Or am I misunderstanding things?

Answer 1

That keyword definitely does not seem like it would be "Easy" to rank for. I just checked two other keyword analyzers to compare and found the following:

• ahrefs.com has "internet retail" listed as 78/100 difficulty with the average backlinks being ~310 and DA in the 80s.
• Moz.com has the phrase ranked as 54/100 difficulty with average backlinks being ~688 and DA in the high 70s.

That being said, there are 4 site pages on the SERP that have less than 50 backlinks and 2 more with less than 100. This is why each of the services ranks the difficulty differently as they use different ranking factors. Either way, this would not be an easy task to rank on the front page of Google for this keyword.