5 Search Marketing Tools To Analyze Your Website Performance

Marketers have had a love-hate relationship with Google’s PageRank for as long as it existed. In early 2016, Google finally killed PageRank, a metric that had become synonymous with the company’s search engine algorithm. In the absence of PageRank, one may find it difficult to study the performance of websites from a search marketing standpoint. In this article, we will study a few alternate metrics that marketers may make use of to analyze their website.

Moz Domain Authority

Domain Authority, or DA for short, is one of the two most popular alternatives to PageRank. Devised by Moz, the Domain Authority is a score that is assigned to each unique domain name based on nearly 40 different factors, including the number of linking root domains, the total number of links, the proprietary MozRank and MozTrust metrics. The resulting number is on a 100-point scale with the most popular websites scoring a near-100. While the exact algorithm that Moz uses to derive the Domain Authority is not known, it is generally regarded a pretty good substitute for PageRank. For what it’s worth, Google.com and Yahoo.com themselves score a perfect 100 on the DA scale while Moz.com scores 93.

Moz Page Authority

Domain Authority is a score that is accorded to an entire domain. So regardless of whether you measure the score for the root domain or one of the several smaller sub-domains, the DA score remains the same. If you are looking for a closer alternative to PageRank, then you must check out the Moz Page Authority. Based off the same factors that influence the Domain Authority, the Page Authority is a score that is awarded for unique pages, much alike the Google PageRank. However, the Moz Page Authority is a score on a 100-point scale.

Majestic Trust Flow

Although Moz has kept the exact factors influencing the Domain Authority a secret, it can still be easily manipulated. Majestic’s Trust Flow is generally regarded a more reliable way to track website authority. Trust Flow essentially measures the authority of a page based on the authority of websites/webpages linking to it. This has been done by seeding the measurement with a crowdsourced list of trustworthy websites and measuring the flow of trust to the webpages that these seeded websites link to. In short, a webpage that is linked from the homepage of CNN.com is likely to gather more trust than a webpage that is linked from a random blog of a little known local business website. Like its Moz cousins, Trust Flow too is based on a 100-point scale.

Majestic Citation Flow

Citation Flow is typically used in conjunction with Trust Flow since they are both owned by Majestic. Citation Flow is based on the premise that not all links are created equal. It measures the trust that flows to a webpage based on the trust of the webpages that link to it as well as the number of pages that link to any webpage. Like all the metrics we have seen so far, citation flow too is measured on a 100-point scale.

Ahrefs URL Rating

This score from Ahrefs primarily measures the strength of a backlink profile. It is calculated based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to any webpage. One quality high authority page link can contribute to a lot more URL Rating than links from dozens of spammy webpages. But given that the URL Rating is only based on the backlink profile makes it less useful than the other alternatives in the market. As a marketer, you may also be aware that Google itself is moving away from links as its strongest signal for link quality. This makes Ahrefs URL Rating all the less valuable.

There are a host of other metrics too that one can make use of. Ahrefs Domain Rating ranks domains rather than individual pages. There is also Power*Trust from LinkResearchTools that is similar to the Ahrefs metrics that measure the power of a website or page based on the number and quality of links. There are also indirect ways to measure the quality of a site using traffic rank tools like Alexa or SEMRush. None of these tools can be regarded as one hundred percent accurate. However, they are all relative and can help marketers track the direction that your website is taking and how well it is doing against competition.

About the author

Trott advises small businesses on their market go-to strategy. He may be reached at [email protected]

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