seoClarity Creates the Most Reliable Keyword Difficulty Score for SEOs

New Page Strength Metric Shows Highest Correlation to Rankings

Leading the charge in AI-driven SEO innovations for enterprises, seoClarity has launched its latest AI development, Keyword Difficulty, the most reliable way to determine ranking difficulty for any keyword.

Built from the ground up over the last three years, seoClarity’s Keyword Difficulty score is based on a brand new metric—seoClarity’s Page Strength.

Keyword Difficulty’s innovative Page Strength metric goes beyond backlink-counting models and offers a comprehensive evaluation of a page’s topical relevance, or page strength.

“seoClarity’s approach is significantly different and takes into account everything known about a page to create a composite score called Page Strength,” said Mitul Gandhi, seoClarity’s Co-founder and Chief Architect.

Page Strength leverages every data point in seoClarity’s industry leading Research Grid dataset—keywords, search volume, volatility, SERP features, backlinks and most importantly, on-page content—and applies sophisticated AI to calculate the page strength of every one of the 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,” Gandhi explained. “In fact, the last study on this showed only a 0.233 correlation.”

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In contrast, seoClarity’s Page Strength shows a correlation of 0.51 to rankings and has been validated multiple times by third-party statistical studies, making it the highest correlation any SEO metric has ever achieved to rankings.

For years, the SEO industry has predominantly relied on backlinks as the primary factor for calculating keyword difficulty. However, search engines have evolved dramatically since the birth of these metrics.

As Duy Nguyen of Google’s Search Quality Team recently stated, “Backlinks as a signal have a much less significant impact compared to when Google Search first started out many years ago.” Gary Illyes even stated at September’s PubCon event that links “aren’t even in the top three” of ranking factors.

Mark Traphagan, seoClarity’s VP of Training and Product Marketing, highlights the importance of this release, saying, “Given the limitations of the “link factor” approach, Page Strength as the focus for Keyword Difficulty provides a clear and actionable metric for prioritizing topics.”

One client, Niall Brooke, an Ecommerce SEO Manager for leading UK and International omni-channel retailer, Matalan, shared, “There’s a lot more that goes into how difficult a keyword is to rank for these days; having a complex algorithm worked out for you is really beneficial and a big time-saver.”

Current clients can access Keyword Difficulty throughout the seoClarity platform, including Research Grid, Topic Explorer, and Content Fusion.

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