Top Pages — Page Authority

In this article, we are looking at top pages for Page Authority, looking to answer the question, “Which pages have the most Page Authority?”

First, let’s set up a view for this in the Pages Inventory.

Use these data points

1. URL
2. Top Valued Topic
3. Page Authority
4. Avg. Topic Authority
5. Organic Traffic Est.
6. Potential Traffic Gain
7. Topic Volume

The first two pieces of data (URL and Top Valued Topic) help to recognize what the page is about.

Page Authority is a combined measurement of traffic and ranking and is calculated relative to other pages on your domain. Pages with high Page Authority are those that get a great deal of traffic and rank for many topics.

Average Topic Authority averages the topical authority of all the ranking topics for that page. Topic authority is a measurement of how well your site performs for a specific topic.

Organic Traffic Estimate is an estimate of the amount of traffic this page currently receives. Potential Traffic is an estimate of the page’s traffic potential. Topic Volume measures the amount of monthly searches for all the topics for which the page ranks. Organic Traffic Estimate, Potential Traffic, and Topic Volume are interchangeable, depending on which you prefer to measure.

Sort by

• Page Authority descending (highest to lowest)

Using this view

Sorting by Page Authority allows you to quickly identify which pages on your site have the most authority relative to other pages on your site. Compared to the other ones, they are the most mature and well-developed ones. This view provides the opportunity to double check whether the pages you expect to see in the list are actually there.

Finding Pages at Risk

By comparing Page Authority with Topic Authority you can find pages that are potentially at risk. A strong page (high Page Authority) with low Topic Authority means that a competitor could potentially create a bigger cluster around the subject and gain more authority.

Investigating Pages of Interest

You can drill further down to investigate pages of interest and determine how they're generating traffic. As explained in the video, you can see the terms for which a page ranks, and sort by a number of metrics depending on your objective. In this way you discover how best to update a page through additional topics or improving coverage of existing ranking topics. Alternatively, you may decide to build out a cluster by devoting new pages to related topics.

Read Content Optimization: Should I Update an Existing Page, Create New Content or Both?

Customizing this view

Here are a few ideas for customizing this view:

• Apply a filter based on Page Authority to shorten the list and make it easier to work with.
• Apply an additional filter on the URL to focus on a specific part of your site. For example, if your blog is on a subdomain or a folder and the URLs contain the term “blog” you can filter for all URLs containing the term “blog”.
• Sort on Potential Traffic Gain to isolate those pages which would benefit most from an update.
• Alternatively sort on Organic Traffic Est. or Topic Volume.

Read Working With Filters to learn how to create filters.