Before you put a lot of work into your site’s SEO, it’s helpful to know if your site even has a chance of ranking for specific keywords and phrases.
And that starts by knowing your website’s Domain Authority.
Andy Crestodina, founder of Orbit Media Studios, shares an eye-opening way to know your web domain’s ability to rank for specific keywords in this clip from MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2023.
Check out Andy’s insights in the video or read the transcript below.
And for more SEO tips from Andy, check out the MarketingProfs exclusive Master Class he hosts, The Art of Being Found: SEO for (non-techie) Marketers. Available now—and it’s free to MarketingProfs PRO members!
Other companies came along and made their own metrics, to be proxies—sort of estimates—to Google’s own metrics. Moz is one of these. There’s three or four of these tools. I’ll show you them all.
Moz is a popular tool. They call theirs Domain Authority, capital D, capital A. That’s the Moz metric. They made it up, but it’s an estimate of what Google’s doing.
ahrefs call theirs Domain Rating. SEMrush calls theirs Authority Score. Serpstat calls theirs Serpstat Domain Rating.
These are just different tools that are estimating Google’s own metric.
Each of these tools is going to cost you 150 bucks a month or something.
I’m going to show you a free way to get that same information without buying a tool using the MozBar. It’s a Chrome extension.
Download MozBar, add it to Chrome. And then, when you search, go to your website, click the little blue M, and a bar will appear at the top showing you your own authority level.
That’s how you discover your own authority level, your ranking potential.
If you’re not doing this, you’re really not doing search.
There’s no way to do SEO without this information. Because you might be targeting key phrases for which you have a 0% chance of ranking! And I mean a 0% chance of ranking.
So up there you can see the Domain Authority, the overall credibility of the website, the page authority, the specific chance of that one URL.
And then now we can understand if that phrase is too competitive, or if we have a chance at it.
You can actually sort of eyeball this. Just search for the key phrase and if you see a whole bunch of ads at the top… then there’s a lot of conversion opportunity, so bigger players are in there. Famous brands at the bottom. You might see features where Google itself is going to compete with you, through featured snippets and knowledge panels, and “people also ask” boxes.
Click-through rates in Google are very challenging these days. They put so much stuff in there, like a bunch of videos. Like, where’d that come from?
But if you turn on MozBar and do the same search and scroll down, it overlays onto search results, the authority metrics of all the pages that rank!
So now you just have to look: Are you in the same range as the other pages that rank for that key phrase?
That’s the game.
You have to do this.
If you don’t do this, you really don’t know if you’re targeting a key phrase for which you have a chance. You install MozBar, look at your page’s authority, go search for the phrase, look at the authority of the other pages that rank, and if you’re in that same range, you’ve got a chance.
If they’re all far above you, you have no chance. You need to target a different key phrase.
That’s how we understand competition. That’s how authority plays a factor in keyword research and content marketing and what we target.
====
SAVE FOR LATER
You can get access to all 17 lessons in Andy’s SEO Master Class and one-on-one consultation opportunities with Andy when you join the MarketingProfs PRO community. Discover more about PRO membership here.
===
Published 10/12/23
B2B Forum is packed with marketing insights, strategies, and tactics taken from the real world experience of over forty industry experts, packaged into context you can actually put to use. Andy will be there with a full-day workshop on AI for B2B Content and Lead Generation. You won’t want to miss it!
Join us in Boston for B2B Forum 2024 this coming November 12-14, 2024. Early buyers get B2B Forum tickets at their lowest rate, and discounted hotel rooms are available while they last.
