Brand Authority

Brand Authority™ is a score (1-100) developed by Moz that measures the total strength of a brand. With Brand Authority, Moz makes the elusive but powerful idea of brand into concrete and actionable data.

We all know that brands, often fueled by billions in marketing dollars, hold major influence over the online and offline worlds. It’s natural to assume that this influence extends to search engine results and even rankings, but that relationship can be hard to disentangle.

Consider a Google search for “Apple.” A searcher using that term could mean Apple the company, apple the fruit, Apple the 1990 studio album by Mother Love Bone, etc.

Search engines have to choose, though, and Google calls that choice the dominant interpretation. The image above recreates a diagram in Google’s own Quality Rater Guidelines, illustrating why Apple the brand is the answer most searchers expect. In this case, a brand takes precedence over one of the most common foods on the planet.

Search engines have to model the real world, and brands are a huge part of the real world. Searchers expect to find known brands even in cases where those websites aren’t perfectly optimized or don’t have the highest Domain Authority™.

Additionally Google rewards brands in other ways, including expanded listings (like sitelinks), Knowledge Graph (entity) results, duplicate rankings on page one, and a higher likelihood of certain types of rich results.

Over the last ten years, there's been quite a dramatic shift in the diversity and the presence of SERP features in search results. It's not just that Apple's coming up number one organically. Apple, and all kinds of brands, including many medium-sized and smaller brands, receive additional brand signals in the form of SERP features like sitelinks and knowledge panels.

Looking at a Google search for the term “Apple.” Straight away, you’ll notice the number one position with expanded sitelinks taking up a bunch of real estate. Underneath the expanded sitelinks is another feature called Latest from Apple.com. This is not just any news result: it is only news about Apple the company.

There is also a knowledge panel on the right talking about Apple as a company, giving information about its stock and its products, further showing that Google understands Apple is an entity.

Brand impact on the search results also dramatically impacts click-through rates from organic results.

Referencing a previously unpublished study from five years ago that Dr. Pete and Russ Jones, our late colleague, worked on together, you can see that when comparing 10 organic blue links with SERPs with sitelinks, the presence of sitelinks had a huge impact on the CTR curve.

Looking at this model, when there were no SERP features present in the SERP and the results consisted of only ten blue links, the number one position got about a 45% CTR. The inclusion of just one sitelinks feature increased clicks for the number one position to 80% and dropped the number two position to 5%. Google is very good at determining what brands and entities are big enough and important enough to need those and which searched are ones where people are definitely looking for a dominant interpretation (i.e. Apple the company and not the fruit). This shows the very practical SEO implications of brand strength.

The Brand Authority journey started with the aim to better understand how important brands and brand entities are to Google in order to more accurately measure brand strength.

When exploring the concept of measuring the strength of a brand, it was necessary to first identify the elements that make up the concept of a brand: the brand name and products and so on. This isn’t an easy task. Consider two branded word clouds for Apple.com:

Branded (or navigational) searches like “apple” and “apple store” (on the left) are relatively easy to detect, but what about searches on the right like “app store”, “ipad mini”, and “macbook pro”? While none of these contain the word “apple”, they clearly represent awareness of strongly-branded products and services. Using Moz’s deep expertise in SERPs and search intent, we identify a wide variety of brand searches and their popularity.

Although these are not the only factors considered when calculating the complex Brand Authority metric, they are a critical piece of the puzzle. Ultimately, understanding a brand’s salience online has to heavily consider how people (and search engines) identify that brand, along with demand and popularity.

This results in a 1-100 score. Like Domain Authority, this score is non-linear — a difference of 10 points near the top of the scale (80-90, for example) represents a much larger gap than a difference of 10 points toward the bottom of the scale (10-20). Please note that Brand Authority is currently focused on the United States and is driven by US data.

When marketers traditionally talk about “brands,” we intuitively know what we mean, but we tend to do a lot of hand-waving. Once we can start to measure the [previously] unmeasurable, it opens up new opportunities (including many we probably haven’t thought of yet). Here are just a handful of ideas for how you can put Brand Authority to work.

(1) Strength and gap analysis

Brand Authority can help you better assess your strength as a brand and identify opportunities for improvement. Super-optimizing your website could result in diminishing returns (and poor ROI) if no one knows who you are. On the other hand, if you’re a more well-known brand but are lagging online, investing in your SEO and content efforts might be money much better spent than more offline advertising.

(2) Assessing brand value/potential

From sales prospects to mergers & acquisitions (M&A) targets to reputation management clients, Brand Authority allows you to measure a brand’s broader strength and influence, and helps to determine if they’re a good opportunity for you. Many under-performing sites might be built by solid brands with ample room for growth, while some seemingly strong sites could be built around virtually unknown companies, creating challenges to broader marketing efforts.

(3) Measuring impact of digital PR

While everyone hopes to get authority-passing links from their digital PR efforts, a big part of the PR game is the viral power of the mentions themselves. Brand Authority provides PR agencies with a quick and easy way to illustrate the broader impact of PR campaigns by measuring the actual word-of-mouth influence of the brands that pick up your stories.

By making the concept of brand concrete, we hope that Brand Authority opens up new opportunities for marketers, even beyond SEO. We look forward to seeing how you put Brand Authority to work as the metrics and tools evolve (and we’d love to hear about it).

Domain Authority is still a powerful tool for assessing the online strength and potential ranking power of a site. By adding Brand Authority to the mix, we’ve created an even more powerful duo that reflects a wide range of real-world authority signals and reflects the evolving reality of search engine marketing.

To see how Brand Authority and Domain Authority work together, consider the two-by-two matrix below and the cases where one score is high but the other is low:

An online-only or e-commerce brand might have high Domain Authority but lower Brand Authority. That brand is pulling in search traffic, but they might not be driving new search traffic via word of mouth. On the flip side, a strong brick-and-mortar brand might be well-recognized, but their online presence could be weak, limiting their full potential.

Working together, Brand Authority and Domain Authority can help you understand your gaps and guide higher-ROI marketing efforts. This duo can also better equip you to understand your own ability to compete or to gauge the strength of a prospect or target company.

You can currently find Brand Authority in our Domain Overview tool or in the Moz API. If you’d like to see a snapshot of top brands, you can also visit our Top 500 Brands list.

We can’t all be Google or Amazon, and a “good” Brand Authority score depends a lot on your niche and your aspirations. Generally speaking, your own Brand Authority score isn’t worth obsessing over. Focus on using Brand Authority to benchmark yourself against your competitors, assess your strengths, and figure out where to put your marketing efforts.

The short answer is painfully obvious — get more people talking about your brand. If you’re annoyed right now, we get it, but sometimes as search marketers we do have to remember that marketing isn’t just about intercepting traffic. It’s about driving interest in who you are and what you do. That’s not just good marketing; it’s good SEO. Building your brand ultimately means driving new search terms and search volume that didn’t previously exist.

Keep in mind that your brand goes far beyond just your company name, and even a niche brand can be impactful. Take Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), for example. While the company is fairly well known, they’ve also done a tremendous job of branding their processors (Radeon, Ryzen, Epyc, etc.), to the point that many people ask for those processors by name. Or what about Emerson Electric? Even if you’ve never heard of them, most homeowners in the US have heard of their InSinkerator line of garbage disposals.

Even a niche brand can set you apart from the competition and drive traffic to your door. Ultimately, Brand Authority is a tool for understanding how you’re perceived in the real world, where your marketing gaps are, and, hopefully, a path to a better bottom line.

Learn about why SEOs should measure brand in Tom Capper's Whiteboard Friday: