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I think I understand. It can definitely be tough to work out the right metrics to evaluate a site's search potential, or even the right metrics to report down the line.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think you'll learn much from the numbers you're talking about. There are just so many variables—size of site, marketing strategy, product offering, and specific goals are only a few—that a formula like that can't be universally applicable. Plus, there's the simple fact that in a vacuum a click is pretty much worthless. Who's clicking? Why? Why do you _want _them to? Where are they landing? What did they search for? What are they looking for?

This isn't quite so concrete, but start by thinking about what you want to get from your SEO work. Is it just more clicks? Is it more conversions? Is it greater brand visibility?

Patrick gave a really, really good list of educational resources that might help you wrap your head around everything, but I'd actually recommend starting with the Beginner's Guide to SEO. For the sake of your question, you may want to focus on Chapter 10, Measuring and Tracking Success. That should give you a good sense of what constitutes "success" from an SEO perspective. I also recommend this checklist for a technical SEO audit, which will give you a much better idea of what kind of work you've got ahead of you. (If it looks kind of screwy, it's because of our recent blog redesign. Working on it!)

Yeah, I'm also not familiar with that. Are you basing your report on the site's SEO on that number?

I agree with Bob, and I want to add that one-word keywords tend to be _extremely_difficult to rank for. Your best bet is to focus your pages on the key phrases that make the most sense based on the topics of those pages.

Have you ever read Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research?" It's a bit on the older side, but is still quite relevant. It might help you wrap your head around some of the intricacies of keyword targeting, and how search engines are learning to understand topics and intent.

Yeah, I have to agree that it's pretty unlikely the URL alone is the thing helping them rank.

Since you're a Pro subscriber, I'd suggest using the Keyword Difficulty Tool to run a Full SERP Report on that keyword. That might help you work out what's going on.

Cyrus Shepard made a video explaining that report that I think could be useful.

Patrick pretty much nailed it. For one thing, Google's index is bigger than ours, as they have the resources to crawl a lot more, a lot faster. Our index also tends to focus on somewhat higher-authority links—the ones that will really count in your backlink profile.

There's some more information on how the index works and why URLs may be missing here.

Got it! There are a few possible explanations for what's going on, but the most likely is simply that the links you've gathered—primarily through social network accounts—aren't being seen by the Mozscape index, and so aren't showing up in OSE.

Mozscape's crawler focuses on breadth rather than depth. What that means is that it'll only follow links on any given site so deeply. That allows us to index more sites, but it means that some very deep pages aren't going to be crawled.

In the case of social networks and business directories, just about any outbound links to individual sites are going to be too deep for Mozscape to index. There are just too many listings, and there's a whole lot more internet out there! This generally works out, since there's little if any ranking value in those links—they're not earned—and since the purpose of them tends to be for traffic or for local SEO, rather than for building link count.

To build DA, you'll need to focus on building links from high quality, high authority, relevant sites.

Does that make sense?

Hi Cindy!

Patrick has you pretty solidly covered on how to raise DA. Just wondering, though, how long have you been checking this client's DA? More than a month or so?

You got it! We're focused on the blog for now, but it should be responsive as of this afternoon (Seattle). We're all pretty excited.

If it makes things easier, based on your settings in that campaign you've always been crawling "all sites," including http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com. If this is due to a redirect, I'd guess that it's due to a redirect having been removed.

Have there been any changes made on that site recently?

It's really hard to say, and it's definitely not unheard of for rankings to vary wildly between search engines. It's possible that you lost some ranking power when you nofollowed those links, or that Google is just trying to figure out where to rank you now that your link profile has changed. It's also possible that it's completely unrelated.

Honestly, that's why I recommend the Full SERP Report—it might help you work out what it is that's letting the sites ranking above you pull ahead.

I agree with the sentiment here, Moosa, but know that PA and DA do take link quality into account, and they won't necessarily go up when you get new links. There's actually a huge number of factors that goes into calculating those metrics. (Check out our overview of Page Authority here, and of Domain Authority here.)

For example, both metrics consider MozTrust, which measures the inherent "trust value" of linking sites. So to use a pretty simple scenario, if you gain a few links from less-trusted (but not necessarily bad) sites, and lose one link from a very high-trust site, you may actually see PA and DA decrease.

It's not unheard of for a high-trust site to go offline and drop the DA and PA of any sites it had linked to, as well as sites those sites link to. That's one of the reasons that we generally recommend using DA and PA to benchmark yourself against your competitors rather than as an absolute measure of your "rankability." Make sense?

Just wanted to set the record straight.

I recommend this all the time—so it's possible there are folks here who are getting tired of hearing about it—but the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool might be able to get you some insight. It can give you a pretty good idea of what factors are leading to the top 10 sites for any given keyword ranking where they are, which can help you zero in on exactly what you'll need to focus on.

Cyrus Shepard gives a really good overview of how it works in this video.

Hi there! It's definitely something we're aware folks want, and it's on our radar for the future. There's no official ETA yet, though.

In the meantime, there are some workarounds and tools that may help.

1. If you're not using all of your available campaigns, try adding a second campaign for the same site, and add up to 3 different competitors there (OP alluded to this).

2. Some of the research tools—specifically, Open Site Explorer and Rank Tracker—can help you get data on more competitors. The only issue is that they won't automatically update each week as your campaigns do, so you'll need to go in to pull more data when you need it.

   In OSE, Competitive Link Metrics lets you compare the page-, subdomain-, and domain-level metrics of up to 5 sites at a time (the one you initially searched for and four more).

   Rank Tracker allows you to pull ranking information on-demand for any site.

You may also appreciate the competitive insights you can get from the Keyword Difficulty tool and its Full SERP Analysis Report. Cyrus Shepard does a great job of covering how that works in this video.

I hope that helps hold you over a bit!

Thanks for the update! So glad it's working now.

Hi Jonathan,

I went ahead and changed the status of that question to "Unanswered." Know, though, that the answer Sean provided may be the best we can do at this point.

I'm so sorry! Honestly, your best bet will be to email help@moz.com about the issue. They can look more deeply into it and determine what's going on, and what might need to be done to fix the problem.

I'm sure you and they can get this resolved!

I'm so sorry it's still not working for you. Just to make sure I'm understanding the issue you're having, is the problem that the tool isn't functioning at all? Or that there are pages you expect to be indexed that aren't indexed?

Hi there!

It's definitely something we have in mind, but there isn't currently a timeline for release. I promise, it'll be well-publicized when we do.

Hi Eslam!

You're right—we have had some outages over the past week or so. You can always get updates on that sort of thing on our Health page. Looks like things should be working now, but you can still see the updates on the issue and what we did to fix it.

Is it working for you?