How to Explain Domain Authority to a Non-SEO

Do you ever have to explain the importance of Domain Authority to clients or co-workers who have little or no SEO experience? If so, this week’s WBF host — Andy Crestodina — walks through how to get your message across successfully.

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Video Transcription

SEO is actually really hard to explain. There are so many concepts. But it’s also really important to explain so that we can show value to our clients and to our employers.

My name is Andy Crestodina. I’m the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. We’re a web design company here in Chicago. I’ve been doing SEO for 20 years and explaining it for about as long. This video is my best attempt to help you explain a really important concept in SEO, which is Domain Authority, to someone who doesn’t know anything at all about SEO, to someone who is non-technical, to someone who is maybe not even a marketer.

Here is one framework, one set of language and words that you can use to try to explain Domain Authority to people who maybe need to understand it but don’t have a background in this stuff whatsoever.

Search ranking factors

Okay. Here we go. Someone searches. They type something into a search engine. They see search results.

Why do they see these search results instead of something else? The reason is: search ranking factors determined that these were going to be the top search results for that query or that keyword or that search phrase.

Relevance

There are two main search ranking factors, in the end two reasons why any web page ranks or doesn’t rank for any phrase. Those two main factors are, first of all, the page itself, the words, the content, the keywords, the relevance.

SEOs, we call this relevance. So that’s the most important. That’s one of the key search ranking factors is relevance, content and keywords and stuff on pages. I think everyone kind of gets that. But there’s a second, super important search ranking factor. It’s something that Google innovated and is now a really, really important thing across the web and all search.

Links

It’s links. Do these pages have links to them? Are they trusted by other websites? Have other websites kind of voted for 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 two main search ranking factors are relevance and authority. Therefore, the two main types of SEO are on-page SEO, creating content, and off-site SEO, PR, link building, and authority. Because links basically are trust. Web page, links to web page, that’s kind of like a vote.

That’s a vote of confidence. That’s saying that this web page is probably credible, probably important. So links are credibility. Good way …read more

Source:: Moz Blog