Let’s take a look at two important MarketMuse metrics, Topic Authority and Personalized Difficulty.
How to Use Topic Authority and Personalized Difficulty
Topic Authority represents your competitive advantage. When working with a topic where you already have high authority, you are more likely to be successful in increasing your search visibility.
Look for situations where you have a Topic Authority of at least 5 to 10.
Personalized Difficulty represents how hard it is for you to rank for a specific topic, based on your site and its contents. It’s also an indicator of the amount of effort required.
Topics with low Personalized Difficulty typically require minimal effort — optimizing a page if it aligns directly with the topic. When you have high Personalized Difficulty, it will require more effort — that may mean optimizing a cluster if one exists or building out a new one, if there’s nothing there.
Use this to estimate the amount of effort required
1 to 20 — optimize the existing page (assuming the topic matches what the page is about), otherwise create a new page.
20 to 35 — optimize the page as above and create/optimize a page or two of supporting content
35 to 50 — optimize the page as above and build out/optimize your existing cluster.
50 plus — most likely you don’t have a cluster so you’ll need to build out this foundation.
The ideal situation is where you have high Topic Authority and low Personalized Difficulty. High Topic Authority means you’re most likely to achieve success while low Personalized Difficulty means a minimal amount of effort is required.
Use Personalized Difficulty with Topic Authority — prioritize opportunities that don’t require much effort (low Personalized Difficulty) where you’re most likely to succeed (high Topic Authority).
How MarketMuse Calculates Keyword Authority and Personalized Difficulty
To determine Topic Authority, we examine your entire site to see how that topic is covered, both from a breadth and depth perspective. We take search performance into account — both current and historical, so we capture that momentum. And we also look at additional factors. That results in a value of anywhere between -100 and +100.
We also calculate Keyword Difficulty much the same as any other platform does. Keyword difficulty is a generic metric and is primarily link-based. As such, it applies to everyone and no one in particular.
MarketMuse subtracts your Topic Authority from Keyword Difficulty to arrive at your Personalized Difficulty. That’s why we refer to Topic Authority as your competitive advantage.
If you have no Topic Authority, then your Personalized Difficulty = Keyword Difficulty.
Learn more in What is Personalized Keyword Difficulty and Why You Need It