‘Most SEOs Are No Better than a Coin-Flip at Predicting Which Page Will Rank Better. Can You?’ – MOZ

Will Critchlow says, “We want to be able to answer questions about why one page outranks another.

“What would we have to do to outrank that site?”

“Why is our competitor outranking us on this search?”

These kind of questions — from bosses, from clients, and from prospective clients — are a standard part of day-to-day life for many SEOs. I know I’ve been asked both in the last week.

It’s relatively easy to figure out ways that a page can be made more relevant and compelling for a given search, and it’s straightforward to think of ways the page or site could be more authoritative (even if it’s less straight-forward to get it done). But will those changes or that extra link cause an actual reordering of a specific ranking? That’s a very hard question to answer with a high degree of certainty.

When we asked a few hundred people to pick which of two pages would rank better for a range of keywords, the average accuracy on UK SERPs was 46%. That’s worse than you’d get if you just flipped a coin!”.

Most SEOs Are No Better than a Coin-Flip at Predicting Which Page Will Rank Better. Can You?

MOZ