Cartoon of the Week: Divert Your Focus from Domain Authority

By Tate Handy

A few years ago, SEOs were putting a large emphasis on links as a way to measure the success of your SEO campaign. Just a few years ago, the way to increase your rankings was to build as many links with the keywords that you wanted to target. SEO has evolved immensely over the past few years and this old form of link building can now put your site at risk for a manual web spam penalty.

Now that we’ve made a shift towards creating engaging content that can generate links on its own, we need to re-evaluate how we measure the success of our SEO campaigns. Many clients still ask us about rankings, the number of links we have built driving people to their sites, and their Domain Authority (DA) score. While all of these are certainly valid questions to ask, we should really be focusing on the metrics that make your business money!

While it’s nice to know your rankings and domain authority score, the metrics we should be focusing on are organic traffic, organic revenue, and the number of organic goal completions. At the end of the day, I would be ecstatic if a client’s DA was down, but organic revenue was up double digits year-over-year.

The next time you sit down to review your SEO campaign, you should be reporting on the metrics that make your business money! Make sure to include organic traffic, organic revenue, and organic goal conversions in your SEO reports moving forward. At the end of the day, these make your money, not your domain authority score!