How do you measure keyword difficulty?

There are a number of schools of thought on measuring keyword difficulty. I'm wondering which works best for you? The usual suspects...

Paid SEO Software: Ahrefs/Moz/SEMRush/SERanking etc... personally I have a cheap subscription to SERanking and I find it useful. All these tools have a keyword difficulty scoring system. The only problem is though, every marketer on the planet uses the same tools and are probably going after the same head and long-term keywords.

Also, I'm willing to bet there is a sizeable variance between what one tool considers easy and what the next tool does. Since the algorithms are a black box, there's no easy way of determining who is right and who is wrong.

Google Search Console: Where better to get keyword difficulty for Google SEO than from the source right? IMO, not really. First, Google uses broad matching to list keyword info such as corresponding search volume and also buckets the results into categories instead of giving actual figures. To say GSC is vague is an understatement.

Google operator arithmetic: Last but not least. And possibly the option with the most potential IMO. Is what I call Google operator arithmetic. Best demonstrated with an example...

Let's say want to gauge the keyword difficulty of the search term mobile homes Ireland by entering the term in Google. I get 83,200,000 results. Whereas for "mobile homes ireland" i get 18,000 results . And for the operator intitle:"mobile homes Ireland" I get 744 results and finally for inanchor:"mobile homes Ireland" I get 59 results.

Dividing 18,000 by 744. Gives me a ratio of ... 1:24.2. With the higher the number indicating the less competitive the keyword.

I'm wondering though, which google operator arithmetic calculation makes more sense to you? Out of all the above Google page result figures?

What's your preferred way to calculate keyword difficulty?

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