An often underused key performance indicator is the domain authority metric. This measures how trustworthy your website is according to various sources. This is typically calculated based on the number of links to your domain and the authority of the sources of those links. For example, a link from a major news website will have a much greater positive effect than many links from ‘link-dump’ websites. This metric was developed by search engine expert website Moz.com. It is intended to evaluate how well a website will generally rank in search engine results. Domain authority is on a 100 point scale. Since it is highly dependent on links, it is typically significantly easier to go from 20 to 30 than it is to jump from 70 to 80. This is because there is a much smaller group of high quality link sources that will have a positive effect once you are on the higher end. Domain authority is an important key performance indicator for online advertisers, especially those focused on content marketing, because it is a rating aggregated based on interest in your website interpreted from links. In other words, if you are producing compelling content that people want to link to, your domain authority will be much higher.
Historically in search marketing, keywords have been used to target search ranking efforts as well as paid ad campaigns. While these are still significant, recent updates to the way that search engines rank websites have caused a shift in the keyword paradigm. Today, the content and interest in your website are just as important as factors like keyword density. As such, marketers now view keywords as being a common vernacular that can be used to guide users to content they are interested in. This means that the entire digital marketing experience must be even more streamlined. For example, if a user searches for red roses, they had better be sent towards content on red roses. This not only will help to engage the user more, it will also improve ranking on search engines. However, this alone is not enough, that content must be rich, and timely. In other words, generating content that will engage users typically results in better search engine ranking. Keyword rankings are still important; however, the way they are calculated is changing. Furthermore, filling a website meta-tag with high ranking keywords will no longer drive the traffic it used to.
Increasingly the focus of search engines, ad networks, and marketers is on content that is engaging for the user. As such developing a community around your product and service offerings is essential. The key to this is content marketing. If you own a website about bike repairs, regularly share information on DIY repairs, good bike maintenance, and local biking events. This is the type of content that people interested in bike repairs will be searching for. Follow a user-centric strategy will almost always result in success online. Tools such as domain authority and keyword ranking are useful for determining how effective your content marketing strategy is at attracting high-quality interest to your website. Additionally, delving further into page authority can also help to show if topics on certain landing pages are engaging the right types of users.