At Sales Funnel Professor, we look at broken sales funnels all the time, and sometimes we even come across sites with huge domain authority and no SEO funnel. Domain authority is a measure of a site’s importance and plays a huge role in getting to the top of Google for meaningful results.
Think about this like a gold deposit that own but haven’t mined yet. There’s some work to extract the benefit but if you execute your SEO strategy correctly, you may just have money tree on your hands that will keep your business growing for many years to come.
What Is Domain Authority or Domain Rank?
If you take our SEO course, you’ll find an overview of the early days of SEO back when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still running Google. In those days, Google gave each page a “Page Rank” on a scale of 1 to 10. The higher a page’s rank, the higher it’s authority in the eyes of Google.
In simplified terms, when someone would search for a particular phrase and multiple sites had relevant content, the higher ranked one would come up first or at the top of the page and thus get more clicks than lower-ranked, less-authoritative sites.
A large part of the practice of SEO is growing a site’s authority so that it comes up in the top results.
Google no longer displays “Page Rank” publicly and the algorithm has gotten significantly more complex but the basic concept of a site that has more sites linking back to it still holds. More backlinks means more authority except when they are toxic.
How Can You Check a Site’s Domain Authority?
Paid SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush make it easy to track a your site’s domain authority over time and you can even create reporting on your competitors.
But if you’re reading this article, you’re probably not a subscriber to these tools and you want to find out if you have a gold mine on your hands.
Ahrefs has a free tool for checking domain authority here: https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker
If you don’t know your site’s domain authority, check it now.
What Does an SEO Domain Authority Gold Mine Look Like?
This data makes our hearts hurt. Seriously.
This is the profile of a marketing agency that has been around for a decade:
They have a DR of 56, which is awesome for a professional services company.
Professor’s Note
Ahrefs calls Domain Authority “Domain Rank” and abbreviates it as “DR.”
99 is the highest score or most authoritative. Thinks Facebook, CNN, etc.
DR/DA of 56 and 20.1k backlinks but they rank on exactly one keyword. You guessed it…it’s the name of their company, which is not really a top of funnel at all.
See our article on keyword types if you need a refresher on money phrases.
When see a DR that high, we expect to see 100s of top 10-ranked keywords and even many #1 placements. That’s how a business makes money with SEO.
This company is only appearing for searches by someone who already knows their name, so they have a huge opportunity!
Why Is It a Goldmine?
Getting backlinks is hard! It takes a lot of work.
Google would have you believe that you’ll naturally have websites link to you but how can they even know you exist if you don’t have backlinks?
All websites start at a DA/DR of 0/100. In a leak covered by Rand Fishkin and others, it also became public knowledge that Google does put all year-1 websites in a sort of doghouse. So they’re fighting an uphill battle to build an SEO top of funnel.
But this site already has that base covered. They need an SEO strategy and probably need to disavow a bunch of toxic backlinks.
Yes, you can hurt your SEO if your site is linked to by spammy sites, whether you created the links or not.
This site’s authority needs to be unlocked in order to drive revenue.
Unlocking the Goldmine
This particular agency specializes in a single business vertical. They work for another vertical but let’s pretend they only work for plumbing companies.
They need to do some research on what phrases are commonly searched by plumbing companies and then write content to rank for those.
Phrases that would make sense:
This is Ahrefs output as well. Think of KD (keyword difficulty) as the degree of competition for that phrase where 99 is most difficult. SV means search volume in whichever country you are researching. GSV is global search volume.
So this company that already has a huge domain authority is working in a competitive landscape where the most obvious phrases are only mildly competitive. They’re at a huge advantage to most of the market.
How Common Is This Scenario?
Sites with huge domain authority but not actually monetizing it are super common. Unfortunately, many SEO funnel development projects are terminated early because SEO takes time and if you don’t know how to measure pre-revenue progress, you likely won’t keep working at it. A fractional SEO consultant can help you validate your present situation.
The most common scenario is a company that has been around for a long time and grew by relational sales. Over the years, they’ve been in trade groups, attended conferences, been including in business directories and other links accumulated that they weren’t even aware of.
But they never identified “money phrases” and attempted to rank for those and actually track revenue attributable to SEO.
Should You Look For Your Own Domain Authority Goldmine?
Certain industries are extremely competitive for SEO:
- Car wreck attorneys
- Loan/financial products
- CRMs
…but if your business is either somewhat niche or only competes in a geographical area (local marketing), you might just uncover your next phase of growth.
Beware the SEO Imposter Agencies
Search engine optimization has been around for a long time. There are 1000s of marketing agencies that claim to offer SEO services.
If they were car builders, they’d know how to mount tires on wheels but not how to put gas in the tank.
The agency above offers SEO services…but they don’t rank for a single monetizable keyword. The purpose of SEO work is to attract strangers and revenue.
Need an Expert Opinion On Your Own SEO Opportunity?
Sales Funnel Professor only offers SEO funnel management as part of broader chief marketing officer services engagements or head of growth engagements, but you’re welcome to book a pay-it-forward call with our team.
We’re happy to help you understand what your opportunity looks like.
