If you are still wondering how to build authority, start by assessing what’s pulling your website down.
Maybe your website is suffering from poor website coverage. Or it has useful content but very few relevant external links.
Sometimes, a website has a strong domain, but the service page remains weak.
So, you cannot apply the same authority strategy to all three websites. If you do, it would waste time and budget.
Let Corda analyze your website, check your target pages, and scan your competitors. The platform will also review content, existing links, and visible brand signals to identify the differences.
Next, Corda separates minor issues from major gaps and prioritizes the action plan accordingly.
This page clearly shows what Corda considers an authority gap. We will also discuss the gap mitigation strategies here.
What Is An Authority Gap?
In simple terms, the authority gap is the difference between your website’s existing authority and the projected authority it must have.
Corda maps the authority that specific topics, pages, and audiences on your website should have. Accordingly, Corda maps the healthy authority that your site must have.
Now the question is: how does Corda demonstrate the kind of authority gap your website has? We have engineered the platform to flag all kinds of authority gaps, including:
- Specific topics that competitors might have covered with greater details
- Particular target pages that are not linked to the other pages of your website
- Popular or well-known publishers citing competitors and not your website
- Your brand signals do not directly promote the service or product that you want to scale
- Your content is not gathering editorial references to the extent required
- Siloed pages are getting more authority compared to the remaining sections of the domain
However, Corda will not flag all these issues as “alarming”. Instead, Corda will closely assess whether these gaps will affect your website’s growth objective before delivering your authority growth strategy.
For instance, your competitor might have more backlinks. However, that difference matters only when the extra links provide strategic benefits like topical advantage, better visibility, and search affinity.
Which Authority Areas Does Corda Check?
Corda primarily checks these priority areas. Each area tells a lot about your website:
| Assessment Areas | What Corda Checks | Example of Possible Gaps |
| Website and webpages | The architecture consisting of domain, targeted pages, site map, and support available | There is a strong domain. However, target pages are not internally linked and have no external mentions. |
| Seach and SEO | Search visibility, ranking words, indexing, competitor performance, and page performance | Competitors using the same search terms are more visible than you. |
| Topic | How clinically important is a subject or content topic? | There is one service page on your site, without any kind of supporting content for the service you are endorsing |
| Links | Referring domains, distribution, competitor patterns, relevance, and context | The website has a large volume of links. However, only a few come from the sources associated with your target topic. |
| Editorial | Content quality, placement quality, editorial context, and purpose of a page | You can’t find adequate information or relevance from the page to sync with a natural editorial reference. |
| Brand | Consistency of the brand, sync with a category, external recognition | You see a brand online. However, it’s not properly connected to the primary service it offers. |
By analyzing these areas, Corda can differentiate SEO authority from website authority. Simply put, website authority reflects your website’s overall strength.
That includes the strength of the content, its structure, links, topical authority, and external support available to that page.
SEO authority, on the other hand, is based on the signals that actually promote search visibility. Those signals are relevant content, crawl signals, index signals, keyword quality and coverage, backlink strength, and competitor performance.
How Corda Finds The Authority Gaps
Corda follows a very regulated assessment process. Therefore, you stop viewing the isolated metrics as your main problems. Instead, you start focusing on problems like:
1. Corda Clearly Demonstrates Your Current Position
First, Corda scans your website. Then it checks the pages linked with the proposed authority goal.
The scan results give you the baseline. So you can clearly see where your brand stands. This helps Corda identify current strengths and pinpoint the main challenges you need to act on.
2. Next, Corda Reviews All Target Pages Separately
Any individual domain-level stat cannot define the real condition of your page. That’s why Corda checks individual target pages and the whole website afterward.
Corda specifically checks the purpose, topic, and external links of the page. It also checks the page’s purpose, topic, search positions, and link signals.
However, it checks these aspects in connection with the related content on that page.
This step may expose the fact that the real gap is the issues in the specific page, while the rest of the domain is okay.
For instance, if you have a popular software website, it will have high to moderate authority. But upon detailed checking you may find out that a specific page lacks authority. It could be due to any of the above issues.
Therefore, your authority strategy should focus on the specific page, not the entire website domain.
Corda Checks Topic Coverage
Corda first checks whether your website covers the main subject areas properly and in depth. The main parameters that it checks are:
- The essential subtopics that are not covered
- Pages repeating information
- Pages that are not internally linked
- Topics covered better by competitors
- Target page discussing something unrelated to the main subject of your website
Whenever you find a topic gap, you don’t need to add more content. Sometimes, the required data is already there.
However, the problem may be that it is spread across a few unrelated pages. Often, the pages aren’t clearly aligned with the target topic.
4. Corda Compares Relevant Competitors
The competitor analysis shows why other websites have a clearer authority signal. Competitors may have pages with better topical coverage, higher visibility, more referring domains, better coverage, and stronger brand recognition.
Your motive should not be to link to all high-authority pages of competitors. Instead, Corda checks specific patterns that explain why the competitor website ranks better.
5. Corda Examines Link Relevance And Distribution
A heavy backlink profile won’t clearly show which pages benefit from the links, or whether the linking websites are actually relevant. Corda will check:
- Whether some pages are getting external links
- Is there enough external support for the internal pages
- Whether referring sites match your subject well
- How many publisher categories are missing
- Do competitors get enough coverage from relevant sources which does not mention the brand
6. Corda Reviews Editorial Readiness
Corda does not recommend external placements simply. The platform checks which target pages are actually right for you. That said, your page will show a visible editorial gap when the page’s purpose is unclear.
Or when the page offers very little value to readers. Often, the subject doesn’t match the proposed placement. Or you may find that the page is making claims without a proper explanation.
Finally, check whether the content is thin or if you find a natural relevance. But it’s worst if there is no wider website topic fitting the page.
7. Corda Screens Brand Alignment
Corda checks gaps between current business offerings and how it is represented across all available sources. In most cases, a brand authority gap exists when brand information is inconsistent or external mentions use conflicting descriptions.
Often, the brand isn’t properly associated with its main category. In fact, competitors may get better and more relevant industry coverage.
Remember, the most important services may not be getting realistic brand signals. To address all these issues, Corda treats any authority problem as a backlink issue.
