How to Identify a Website’s Internet Authority and How That Benefits You

Have you ever wondered why certain websites always seem to pop up when you search for specific things? When you search for a new home decor item, sites specific to those items like Target, Walmart and Amazon rank near or at the top. But what about the rest of the sites, the ones ranking lower that go on for pages and pages? Why are they there? The answer is that these sites have a higher authority or presence on the internet. This authority usually stems from criteria such as how much internet traffic they receive, relevance concerning your search word or phrase and the content on their site, how many other sites link to it and how influential those sites are. So how can you identify which sites have this commanding presence and how does that help you?

What is Internet Authority

Internet authority is a metric used to rank a site’s relative power in relation to other sites. A high authority site is a high-quality website well respected in its industry. People recognize and share the site, its information, and its links to other places.

How to Quantify Internet Authority

There are a variety of ways to quantify a website’s strength, but Moz.com is the most popular and widely used because they represent a website’s authority through a straightforward grading system. Moz’s algorithm uses a machine learning model to “predictively find a best-fit algorithm that most closely correlates our link data with rankings across thousands of actual search results that we use as standards to scale against.” A site will score on a logarithmic scale from one to 100. It is significantly easier to improve your site from ten to twenty than it is to develop from sixty to seventy. To put this in perspective, sites like Amazon and Facebook are in the mid to high 90s. Keep in mind that this number is a relative metric that will fluctuate based on new data that is continuously evaluated by the Moz algorithm. While it is an easy way to track a site’s authority, it is not a perfect science.

Other popular tools that help measure a website’s internet presence and are generally on the utility belt of any internet savvy individual are

• SEMRush – A handy tool for researching and understanding keywords and trends related to them.
• Google Analytics – A web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
• Alexa –  A global ranking system that utilizes web traffic data to compile a list of the most popular websites. For this tool, the lower the number, the better.
• Ahrefs – A useful tool for understanding the SEO and backlink portfolio of a website.
• Nibbler – Enter the address of any website and Nibbler will give you a report scoring the site out of 10 for critical areas, including accessibility, SEO, social media, and technology.

How Does This Benefit You

Knowledge is power. The more you know, the better you can make informed decisions. Maybe you’re trying to choose between two law firms in your area. By checking out their respective websites and see how they fair using your ranking tools, you can make a more informed decision. If you’re wondering if a particular blog site would be useful to post news of your upcoming novel, you can take a look at their authority. If it’s too low, you probably don’t want to waste your time with them as they likely don’t command the traffic you’re hoping for in publicizing your work. The benefits of doing a little digging into any website can be invaluable and ultimately may save you from making a costly, ill-informed decision.

For more information on how to improve traffic to your website or other digital marketing needs, contact Performance First Marketing.