How to Discuss Domain Authority to a Non-SEO
Do you ever need to discuss the value of Domain Authority to customers or co-workers who have little or no SEO experience? If so, today's Whiteboard Friday host-- Andy Crestodina-- strolls through how to get your message throughout effectively.
SEO is actually really difficult to discuss. There are so many ideas. But it's likewise truly crucial to explain so that we can reveal worth to our customers and to our companies.
We're a website design business here in Chicago. I've been doing SEO for twenty years and describing it for about as long. This video is my best attempt to help you discuss an actually crucial idea in SEO, which is Domain Authority, to someone who does not know anything about SEO, to someone who is non-technical, to someone who is possibly not even a marketer.
Here is one framework, one set of language and words that you can use to try to describe Domain Authority to people who perhaps need to comprehend it but don't have a background in this stuff whatsoever.
Browse ranking factors
They type something into a search engine. They see search results.
Why do they see these search engine result instead of something else? The factor is: search ranking aspects determined that these were going to be the leading search results for that query or that keyword or that search phrase.
Relevance
There are 2 primary search ranking elements, in the end 2 reasons any websites ranks or doesn't rank for any expression. Those 2 main elements are, to start with, the page itself, the words, the material, the keywords, the relevance.
SEOs, we call this relevance. So that's the most crucial. That's one of the key search ranking aspects is relevance, content and keywords and stuff on pages. I think everybody type of gets that. But there's a second, super crucial search ranking aspect. It's something that Google innovated and is now an actually, really essential thing throughout the web and all search.
Hyperlinks
It's links. Do these pages have links to them? Are they trusted by other websites? Have other websites sort of voted for them based on their content? Have they referred back to it, mentioned it? Have they linked to these pages and these sites? That is called authority.
So the two primary search ranking elements are importance and authority. For that reason, the 2 main types of SEO are on-page SEO, creating content, and off-site SEO, PR, link structure, and authority. Because links essentially are trust. Web page, links to web page, that's sort of like a vote.
That's stating that this web page is probably trustworthy, probably essential. If a lot of pages link to your page, that adds reliability. That's essential that there's a number of sites that link to you.
Link quality
Links from reliable sites are more valuable than just any other link. It's the quantity and the quality of links to your site or links to your page that has a lot to do with whether or not you rank when individuals search for a related crucial expression.
If a page does not rank, it's got one of two issues generally. It's either not an excellent page on the topic, or it's not a page on a site that is relied on by the search engine since it hasn't built up enough authority from other websites, associated sites, media websites, other sites in the industry. The name for this things initially in Google was called PageRank
PageRank.
Capital P, capital R, one word, PageRank. Not web page, not search results page page, however called after Larry Page, the person who sort of developed this, one of the co-founders at Google. PageRank was the number, 1 through 10, that all of us used to kind of understand. It was visible in this toolbar that we used in the past.
We do not really understand our PageRank any longer, so you can't truly inform. The method that we now understand whether a page is reputable amongst other sites is by utilizing tools that emulate PageRank by similarly crawling the internet, looking to see who's connecting to who and then producing their own metrics, which are basically proxy metrics for PageRank.
Domain Authority
Moz has one. It's called Domain Authority. click to read When spelled with the capital D and captial A, that's the Moz metric. Other search tools, other SEO tools likewise have their own, such as SEMrush has actually one called Authority Rating. Ahrefs has one called Domain Rating. Alexa, another popular tool, has one called Competitive Power. They're all generally the same thing. They are showing whether a site or a page is relied on among other sites due to the fact that of links to them.
Now we understand for a reality that some links deserve much, a lot more than others. We can do this by reading Google patents or by experiments or simply best practices and competence and firsthand understanding that some links are worth far more.
But it's not simply that they're worth a little bit more. Links from sites with great deals of authority deserve significantly more. It's not really a fair battle. Some sites have loads and lots and lots of authority. Many sites have very, extremely little bit. It's on a curve. It's a log scale.
It's on a rapid curve the amount of authority that a website has and its ranking capacity. Links from some sites are worth significantly more than links from other smaller sites, smaller sized blog sites.
And what they can do is look at all of the pages that rank for an expression, look at all of the authority of all of those sites and all of those pages, and then average them to reveal the likely problem of ranking for that key phrase. The trouble would be more or less the average authority of the other pages that rank compared to the authority of your page and then identify whether that's a page that you in fact have a chance of ranking for or not.
This might be called something like keyword difficulty. I searched for "baseball training" utilizing a tool. I utilized Moz, and I found that the problem for that key phrase was something like 46 out of 100. To put it simply, your page has to have about that much authority to have a possibility of ranking for that expression. There's a subtle difference between Page Authority and Domain Authority, however we're going to set that aside for now.
That assists us understand the level of authority that we would have to have to have a possibility of ranking for that key expression. If we do not have enough authority, it does not matter how incredible our page is, we're not most likely to ever rank
.
It's really important to understand one of the things that Domain Authority tells us is our ranking capacity. That's the first thing that the Domain Authority defines, steps, shows.
If an incredibly reliable website links to us, high Domain Authority site, that Domain Authority in that case of that site is showing us the worth of that link to us. A link from a site, a brand-new blog, a young site, a smaller brand name would have a lower Domain Authority, indicating that that link would have far less worth.
Conclusion.
Bottom line, Domain Authority is a proxy for a metric inside Google, which we no longer have access to. Domain Authority is the ranking capacity of pages on that domain. And second of all, Domain Authority determines the worth of another website should that website link back to your site.