Now I think the reason this is interesting

[kexej28769@nongnue]

Why SEOs Should Care
This is something I have personally been thinking about for a long time. Here is a study I presented in 2021, which will hopefully be linked below. It's just showing that in terms of domain-level ranking correlation, branded search volume, which is not the same as brand authority but a simpler metric that I had available at the time, branded search volume was actually correlated with ranking as domain authority and definitely more so than domain links.

Figure showing the ranking relationship between domain authority, chinese overseas british database links and branded search volume
It's interesting to me, and I've been learning this way since about 2017. Even though I didn't work at Moz in 2017, little did I know at the time that people at Moz were thinking about this too, and it's something that's been in the works at Moz for a long time. Even when I started at Moz about two and a half years ago, there was already a prototype of this metric, and it was something we were thinking about and refining and iterating on.

A is because there are a few reasons why this happens. Well, why is it that a simple, somewhat silly metric like branded search volume can correlate almost as well with ranking as domain authority? How does this happen? Well, one answer that a lot of SEOs will jump at is, oh, maybe it's the ranking factor.