The next concept that it is important to understand is Domain Authority , often referred to as DA.

This is a very handy metric created by Moz that essentially assesses a domain's potential to rank. The higher the DA, generally the easier it is for the website to rank for a keyword.

For example, in the screenshot below I searched for 'seo analysis,' notice that seoworkers.com (#1 spot) is outranking a near exact match domain, seo-analysis.com (#9 spot), who also has more links, 65,341 vs. 41,935, most likely due to the fact that this domain has significantly higher domain authority; 65 compared to 27.

As you can see in the screenshot above, for the query 'seo analysis' the DA ranges from 27 to 87.

Please also note that in this example the site with the highest DA, SEOchat.com, is also ranking in the last position (#10). This is a perfect example of how there really is no one metric for determining SEO competitiveness.

Taking a closer look at the numbers in the screenshot you will notice that SEOchat.com only has 12 links coming into this page from 2 domains. Also please note that the only site outranking SEOchat.com with less page links (having only 1) is built on Google Sites, giving it a DA of 100.

There are varying opinions as to the true power of domain authority, but in my opinion, it is more or less the holy grail of SEO.

Now that you have your core set of keywords, let's take a look at the DA of the competing websites. This is easily done in Chrome using the Mozbar extension, which will display a metric bar for each search result right underneath the meta description, as you may have noticed in the screenshot above.

Even though it is not a surefire indicator of ranking potential, I still hold that it is important to first look at competitor's DA when starting your SEO analysis. In my opinion this will allow you to gain at least some initial visibility into your ranking potential.

Ranking potential is an assessment of where you can realistically hope to get your rankings to ; if the top 5 websites have a DA of 90+ and your website is at 20, it is not realistic to think that you will be able to grab one of the top 5 spots. Again this is not always the case , but tends to generally be a safe standard of procedure.