How to Discuss Domain Authority to a Non-SEO
Do you ever need to describe the importance of Domain Authority to customers or co-workers who have little or no SEO experience? If so, today'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 principles. It's likewise truly important to describe so that we can reveal value to our customers and to our employers.

We're a website design business here in Chicago. I have actually been doing SEO for twenty years and describing it for about as long. This video is my finest effort to help you describe a really important principle in SEO, which is Domain Authority, to someone who does not understand anything about SEO, to someone who is non-technical, to somebody who is possibly not even an online marketer.
Here is one framework, one set of language and words that you can use to attempt to discuss Domain Authority to people who maybe require to understand it but do not have a background in this stuff whatsoever.
Search ranking elements
They type something into a search engine. They see search results.
Why do they see these search results page instead of something else? The reason is: search ranking factors determined that these were going to be the top search results page for that inquiry or that keyword or that search expression.
Importance
There are 2 primary search ranking factors, in the end two reasons any web page 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 significance.
That's one of the essential search ranking factors is importance, material and keywords and stuff on pages. There's a second, incredibly crucial search ranking factor. It's something that Google innovated and is now an actually, truly important 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 chose them based on their content? Have they referred back to it, cited it? Have they linked to these pages and these websites? That is called authority.
So the 2 main search ranking factors are importance and authority. Therefore, the 2 main kinds of SEO are on-page SEO, developing content, and off-site SEO, PR, link building, and authority. Because links basically are trust. Websites, links to websites, that's sort of like a vote.
That's a vote of confidence. That's saying that this web page is most likely reputable, probably crucial. Links are reliability. Great way to consider it. Quantity matters. If a lot of pages link to your page, that adds reliability. That's important that there's a variety of websites that connect to you.
Link quality
Links from authoritative websites are more important than simply any other link. It's the quantity 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 a related essential expression.
If a page doesn't rank, it's got one of two problems often. It's either not a terrific page on the subject, or it's not a page on a site that is relied on by the search engine since it hasn't developed enough authority from other sites, associated websites, media sites, other websites in the industry. The name for this things originally in Google was called PageRank
PageRank.
Capital P, capital R, one word, PageRank. Not websites, not search results page page, however called after Larry Page, the person who type of developed this, one of the co-founders at Google. PageRank was the number, 1 through 10, that we all utilized to type of know. It showed up in this toolbar that we used back in the day.
They stopped reporting on that. They do not upgrade that anymore. We do not really understand our PageRank anymore, so you can't truly inform. So the way that we now understand whether a page is reliable among other sites is by using tools that emulate PageRank by similarly crawling the internet, seeking to see who's linking to who and then creating their own metrics, which are basically 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 revealing whether or not a site or a page is trusted amongst other websites due to the fact that of links to them.
Now we understand 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 much more.
However it's not simply that they're worth a bit more. Links from websites with lots of authority are worth exponentially more. It's not actually a reasonable fight. Some websites have lots and lots and lots of authority. The majority of sites have really, very bit. So it's on a curve. It's a log scale.
It's on a rapid curve the amount of authority that a site has and its ranking capacity. The worth of a link from another website to you is on an exponential curve. Links from some websites deserve greatly more than links from other smaller websites, smaller sized blogs. These are measurable within these tools, tools like Moz, tools that emulate the PageRank metric.
And what they can do is look at all of the pages that rank for an expression, take a look at all of the authority of all of those websites and all of those pages, and after that balance them to show the likely trouble of ranking for that key phrase. The difficulty would be basically the average authority of the other pages that rank compared to the authority of your page and then identify website and email hosting whether that's a page that you in fact have an opportunity of ranking for or not.

In other words, your page has to have about that much authority to have a possibility of ranking for that phrase. There's a subtle distinction between Page Authority and Domain Authority, however we're going to set that aside for now.
That helps us comprehend the level of authority that we would have to have to have a chance of ranking for that key expression. If we lack enough authority, it does not matter how remarkable our page is, we're not most likely to ever rank
.

If a super reliable website links to us, high Domain Authority website, that Domain Authority in that case of that website is showing us the value of that link to us. A link from a website, a brand-new blog site, a young site, a smaller brand name would have a lower Domain Authority, indicating that that link would have far less value.
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 capacity of pages on that domain. And second of all, Domain Authority determines the value of another site should that site link back to your site. That's it.