How to Describe Domain Authority to a Non-SEO
Do you ever need to explain the significance of Domain Authority to clients or colleagues who have little or no SEO experience? If so, today's White boards Friday host-- Andy Crestodina-- strolls through how to get your message throughout successfully.
SEO is actually really hard to describe. There are a lot of ideas. It's also truly important to explain so that we can show worth to our customers and to our companies.
We're a web design business here in Chicago. I've been doing SEO for 20 years and describing it for about as long. This video is my best attempt to assist you explain a really important idea in SEO, which is Domain Authority, to somebody who doesn't understand anything at all about SEO, to somebody who is non-technical, to someone who is possibly not even a marketer.
Here is one structure, one set of language and words that you can use to try to explain Domain Authority to individuals who perhaps require to understand it however do not have a background in this stuff whatsoever.
Browse ranking factors
Okay. Here we go. Someone searches. They type something into an online search engine. They see search engine result.
Why do they see these search engine result rather of something else? The factor is: search ranking factors identified that these were going to be the leading search results page for that query or that keyword or that search phrase.
Relevance
There are two main search ranking aspects, in the end 2 reasons why any websites ranks or doesn't rank for any phrase. Those 2 primary factors are, first of all, the page itself, the words, the content, the keywords, the importance.
That's one of the essential search ranking factors is importance, material and keywords and stuff on pages. There's a second, very crucial search ranking aspect. It's something that Google innovated and is now a really, really important thing throughout the web and all search.
Hyperlinks
Do these pages have links to them? Have they connected to these pages and these sites? That is called authority.
The two main search ranking factors are significance and authority. The 2 primary types of SEO are on-page SEO, developing content, and off-site SEO, PR, link building, and authority. Since links essentially are trust. Websites, links to websites, that's sort of like a vote.
That's a vote of confidence. That's stating that this websites is probably trustworthy, probably essential. So links are reliability. Excellent way to consider it. Quantity matters. If a lot of pages connect to your page, that adds reliability. That is very important that there's a number of sites that connect to you.
Link quality
Links from reliable sites are more valuable than just any other link. It's the amount and the quality of links to your website or links to your page that has a lot to do with whether or not you rank when people search for an associated crucial expression.
If a page does not rank, it's got one of 2 issues usually. It's either not a terrific page on the subject, or it's not a page on a site that is trusted by the online search engine because it hasn't built up enough authority from other sites, associated sites, media websites, other sites in the industry. The name for this stuff originally in Google was called PageRank
PageRank.
Capital P, capital R, one word, PageRank. Not websites, not search engine result page, but named after Larry Page, the man who kind of created this, among the co-founders at Google. PageRank was the number, 1 through 10, that we all used to sort of understand. It was visible in this toolbar that we utilized back then.
We don't really know our PageRank any longer, so you can't really tell. The way that we now understand whether a page is reputable amongst other sites is by using tools that replicate PageRank by likewise crawling the internet, looking to see who's connecting to who and then developing their own metrics, which are essentially proxy metrics for PageRank.
Domain Authority
It's called Domain Authority. Other search tools, other SEO tools also have their own, such as SEMrush has one called Authority Rating. They are showing whether or not a website or a page is trusted among other sites because of links to them.
Now we know for a reality that some links are worth much, a lot more than others. We can do this by checking out Google patents or by experiments or simply finest practices and competence and firsthand knowledge that some links are worth far more.
However it's not just that they deserve a little more. Hyperlinks from sites with lots of authority are worth tremendously more. It's not truly a reasonable battle. Some websites have loads and wordpress development brisbane tons and lots of authority. The majority of sites have extremely, really bit. It's on a curve. It's a log scale.
It's on an exponential curve the amount of authority that a site has and its ranking capacity. The value of a link from another website to you is on a rapid curve. Links from some sites are worth exponentially more than links from other smaller sites, smaller sized blog sites. These are measurable within these tools, tools like Moz, tools that imitate the PageRank metric.
And what they can do is take a look at all of the pages that rank for an expression, take a look at all of the authority of all of those sites and all of those pages, and then balance them to show the likely difficulty of ranking for that essential expression. The problem would be basically the average authority of the other pages that rank compared to the authority of your page and after that figure out whether that's a page that you actually have an opportunity of ranking for or not.
In other words, your page has to have about that much authority to have an opportunity of ranking for that expression. There's a subtle distinction in 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 essential phrase. If we lack adequate authority, it doesn't matter how amazing our page is, we're not most likely to ever rank
.
It's truly important to understand one of the things that Domain Authority tells us is our ranking potential. Are we sufficiently trusted to have the ability to target that key phrase and possibly rank for that? That's the very first thing that the Domain Authority defines, steps, shows. The 2nd thing that it shows, which I mentioned a 2nd ago, is the value of a link from another site to us.If an incredibly reliable website links to us, high Domain Authority website, that Domain Authority in that case of that site is showing us the worth of that link to us. A link from a website, a new blog, a young site, a smaller brand would have a lower Domain Authority, indicating that that link would have far less worth.
Conclusion.
So bottom line, Domain Authority is a proxy for a metric inside Google, which we no longer have access to. It's developed by an SEO tool, in this case Moz. When spelled with a capital D, capital A, it's Moz's own metric. It reveals us two things. Domain Authority is the ranking potential of pages on that domain. And second of all, Domain Authority determines the value of another site should that website link back to your site. That's it.