There are different factors that determine the SEO quality of a website. In this post we would like to present a series of fundamental SEO tools that help you understand the quality of a website. With these tools you will be able to get to know the authority of your web, the link profile and the SEO visibility. Understanding and analysing these metrics will allow you to make strategic decisions in relation to the SEO actions; actions to take to appear in the first free results of the search engines.
Domain authority
The Domain Authority (DA) measures the authority of a certain web. It is a value that reaches from 1 to 100 and that indicates the weight of a website with respect to organic positioning. It is a logarithmic metric, that is, getting a DA to grow from 10 to 20 is easier than going from a DA of 20 to 30 or from 80 to 90 for example.
The company responsible for indexing websites and determine the DA is Moz. With its (free) tool ´Open Site Explorer´ you can check the DA of a specific website.
The DA is especially useful for analysing the competition. On one hand, it allows us to know what the strength of our domain is in respect to other websites. On the other hand, it helps us to assess the level of difficulty when positioning a certain keyword.
To illustrate the different metrics we will use the case of ´My web´ as an example. In the graphic below you can see the DA of ´My web´ and that of its main competitors.
Currently, the DA of ´My web´ is 24. Compared to the DA of the main competitors it holds the third position. The data shows us that although 24 is a value that is relatively far from the strongest competitor who has a DA of 34; it is close to reaching the DA of 25 of the competitor who is in second position. Secondly, this comparison indicates that there is another competitor (DA 21) who is probably also working on improving the authority of their website and ´steal´ the position from their immediate competitors.
One of the ways to increase the DA of a website is to get a profile of quality links. That is, have incoming links from websites with related themes and high(er) DA.
Link profile
Majestic offers us a series of tools to evaluate the profile of incoming links to a website. It lets us find out the quality of the links, both on your website and other websites like competitors. Finding out which websites have higher quality links helps to decide which websites are interesting to contact for collaboration.
At Majestic the following metrics are interesting to have a look at.
- Trust Flow (TF): this refers to the quality of the links that go to a specific website. It is measured on a score of 0 to 100. Websites that receive links from reliable websites will get a higher score than websites that are being linked to from websites of lower quality.
- Citation Flow (CF): this refers to the number of links that go to a website and, again, scores from 0 to 100 according to the number of links to a specific web.
- Fresh-Referring Subnets: This is the total of unique links from other domains to the destination website.
Good to know: the TF and the CF, like the DA, are logarithmic metrics.
Let´s have a look at the data for ´My web´ for the above mentioned metrics. At the moment the TF is 6, the CT 12 and there are 71 unique links referring to the website.
SEO visibility
SEO visibility allows us to understand how visible a web is in the organic results of the search engines. It is important to remember that it does not refer to the traffic of the web, but to its visibility in the organic search results.
In addition to the visibility at the present time, with the help of a tool like Searchmetrics, we can see the historical evolution (for example, 2 years) of the SEO visibility for a certain web. This historical perspective helps us to know if the web has undergone important technical changes (domain migrations, errors …) as well as penalties from Google. An adequate SEO visibility is one that increases or remains stable over time, without suffering sharp drops.
Currently the SEO visibility of our example ´My web´ is 36. As can be seen following the blue line, the visibility of the web has been increasing progressively and steadily over the past two years. It would be necessary to continue working on the quality level of the web so that the SEO visibility continues the process of increase, avoiding irregularities.
Conclusion
Offsite SEO, through link building activities, seeks to increase the authority and trust ability of a domain, which are key factors for search engines to show a specific website in the first search results.
Getting links from websites with high values of DA, TF and Referring Subnets and a stable SEO visibility over time helps improve the metrics of a particular website. As a result, it increases the likelihood of your website appearing in the organic search results. This is of course essential to increase the amount of traffic from the organic channel to the web.
Does your website get a good score for SEO? Or do you need help to improve your SEO metrics? Get in touch with our team and we will show you what strategic actions you can carry out!
