SeoClarity’s Keyword Difficulty score was built from the ground up over the previous three years and is based on a completely new metric—seoClarity’s Page Strength.
The novel Page Strength metric from Keyword Difficulty goes beyond backlink-counting approaches to provide a full evaluation of a page’s topical relevancy, or page strength.
“seoClarity’s approach is significantly different in that it takes into account everything known about a page to create a composite score called Page Strength,” explained Mitul Gandhi, Co-founder and Chief Architect at seoClarity.
Page Strength uses every data point in seoClarity’s industry-leading Research Grid dataset—keywords, search volume, volatility, SERP features, backlinks, and, most importantly, on-page content—to calculate the page strength of tens of billions of pages across 90+ countries.
“Existing approaches to determining page strength and keyword difficulty using backlinks have shown declining correlation to rankings over the years,” he said. “In fact, the last study on this showed only a 0.233 correlation.”
In comparison, seoClarity’s Page Strength has a correlation of 0.51 to ranks and has been validated several times by third-party statistical studies, making it the strongest correlation to rankings that any SEO metric has ever attained.
For many years, the SEO industry has relied heavily on backlinks as the primary factor in determining keyword difficulty. However, since the inception of these measurements, search engines have grown tremendously.
According to Duy Nguyen of Google’s Search Quality Team, “backlinks as a signal have much less significant impact compared to when Google Search first started out many years ago.” Gary Illyes even claimed at the PubCon event in September that links “aren’t even in the top three” ranking considerations.
Mark Traphagan, vice president of training and product marketing at seoClarity, emphasized the relevance of this update, saying, “Given the limitations of the ‘link element’ approach, page strength that focuses on keyword difficulty , provides clear and actionable metrics for prioritizing. topic. ” Niall Brooke, e-commerce SEO manager at Matalan, a well-known UK and international omnichannel retailer, says: ‘There’s more to how difficult it is to rank for keywords these days. It is important to optimize the algorithm accordingly.” Really beneficial and a huge time saver. ”
Current clients can access keyword difficulty across the seoClarity platform, including Research Grid, Topic Explorer, and Content Fusion.
