How to Discuss Domain Authority to a Non-SEO
Do you ever need to explain the importance of Domain Authority to customers or co-workers who have little or no SEO experience? If so, this week's White boards Friday host-- Andy Crestodina-- walks through how to get your message throughout successfully.
SEO is in fact truly hard to discuss. There are numerous ideas. However it's also truly important to explain so that we can reveal worth to our customers and to our companies.
We're a website design company here in Chicago. I have actually been doing SEO for twenty years and explaining it for about as long. This video is my finest effort to help you discuss a truly important concept in SEO, which is Domain Authority, to somebody who does not know anything about SEO, to someone who is non-technical, to somebody who is maybe not even an online marketer.
Here is one structure, one set of language and words that you can utilize to attempt to explain Domain Authority to people who maybe need to understand it but do not have a background in this stuff whatsoever.
Browse ranking elements
They type something into a search engine. They see search results.
Why do they see these search seo results rather of something else? The factor is: search ranking factors identified that these were going to be the top search engine result for that query or that keyword or that search expression.
Relevance
There are two primary search ranking factors, in the end two reasons any web page ranks or doesn't rank for any phrase. Those 2 primary elements are, first off, the page itself, the words, the content, the keywords, the relevance.
SEOs, we call this significance. That's the most essential. That's one of the essential search ranking factors is importance, content and keywords and stuff on pages. I think everyone kind of gets that. There's a 2nd, super crucial search ranking element. It's something that Google innovated and is now a really, really important thing across the web and all search.
Hyperlinks
Do these pages have links to them? Have they connected to these pages and these websites? That is called authority.
So the two primary search ranking elements are significance and authority. The two primary types of SEO are on-page SEO, creating content, and off-site SEO, PR, link structure, and authority. Because links generally are trust. Web page, links to websites, that's sort of like a vote.
That's a vote of confidence. That's stating that this web page is probably reliable, most likely essential. So links are trustworthiness. Excellent way to consider it. Amount matters. If a great deal of pages connect to your page, that adds credibility. That is very important that there's a number of sites that link to you.
Link quality
Links from authoritative websites are more important than simply 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 doesn't rank, it's got one of two problems 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 search engine because it hasn't developed enough authority from other websites, associated sites, media websites, other sites in the market. The name for this stuff originally in Google was called PageRank
PageRank.
Capital P, capital R, one word, PageRank. Not websites, not search results page, however named after Larry Page, the person who type of created this, one of the co-founders at Google. PageRank was the number, 1 through 10, that we all utilized to sort of understand. It showed up in this toolbar that we utilized back in the day.
They stopped reporting on that. They do not update that anymore. We do not truly know our PageRank anymore, so you can't truly tell. So the manner in which we now comprehend whether a page is reputable to name a few sites is by using tools that imitate PageRank by similarly crawling the internet, seeking to see who's connecting to who and then creating 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 amongst other websites since of links to them.
Now we understand for a fact that some links are worth much, much more than others. We can do this by checking out Google patents or by experiments or just best practices and knowledge and firsthand understanding that some links are worth a lot more.
But it's not just that they deserve a little bit more. Links from sites with great deals of authority are worth significantly more. It's not actually a fair fight. Some sites have heaps and loads and lots of authority. A lot of sites have very, very little bit. So it's on a curve. It's a log scale.
It's on an exponential curve the amount of authority that a website has and its ranking capacity. The value of a link from another website to you is on a rapid curve. Hyperlinks from some sites deserve tremendously more than links from other smaller websites, smaller sized blogs. These are quantifiable within these tools, tools like Moz, tools that replicate the PageRank metric.
And what they can do is take a 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 after that average them to reveal the likely difficulty of ranking for that essential expression. The difficulty would be basically the average authority of the other pages that rank compared to the authority of your page and then figure out whether that's a page that you in fact have a chance of ranking for or not.
This could be called something like keyword difficulty. I searched for "baseball coaching" utilizing a tool. I used Moz, and I found that the problem for that key phrase was something like 46 out of 100. In other words, your page needs to have about that much authority to have an opportunity of ranking for that expression. There's a subtle distinction between Page Authority and Domain Authority, but we're going to set that aside in the meantime.
" Squash coaching," wow, various sport, less popular sport, less content, less competitive phrases ranking for that crucial expression. Wow, "squash training" much less competitive. The difficulty for that was only 18. That helps us comprehend the level of authority that we would have to have to have an opportunity of ranking for that key phrase. If we do not have enough authority, it doesn't matter how incredible our page is, we're not most likely to ever rank
.
So it's really important to understand one of the important things that Domain Authority informs us is our ranking capacity. Are we adequately trusted to have the ability to target that key phrase and potentially rank for that? That's the first thing that the Domain Authority defines, measures, programs. The 2nd thing that it reveals, which I mentioned a 2nd earlier, is the value of a link from another website to us.
If a super authoritative site links to us, high Domain Authority site, that Domain Authority in that case of that website is showing us the worth of that link to us. A link from a site, a new blog site, a young website, a smaller sized brand name would have a lower Domain Authority, indicating that that link would have far less value.
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 potential of pages on that domain. And secondly, Domain Authority measures the worth of another website need to that site link back to your website.