Leadership obsession with Domain Rating is driving me insane

I'm pretty new here, but maybe this seems like a good area to vent since it's general discussion.

I got hired as SEO Manager for a company about 5 months ago, and I kinda figured there were major red flags at the start when I saw one of my KPIs was to get our DR (Ahrefs score) to 50. We're at 47 right now.

Maybe I'm the problem, but I think focusing on one metric from one tool is a little insane. For starters, in my niche, our competitors can gain or lose ~1,000 backlinks and their DR doesn't move at all. I spend half my days e-mailing PBNs and siteowners for guest posts/link insertions.

I've already explained that we could get 500 high authority backlinks tomorrow and it still might not move the needle. Our competitors have 30k+ backlinks from 3-4k domains (we have roughly the same), so it's going to take a LONG time to get our DR to where they want it. No matter what I say or do, it's always "How's our DR doing?"

I also tried pointing out that the sites on page one for our most competitive keywords range from DR 32 all the way up to DR 55. Bumping us from 47 to 50 isn't going to get us on page one.

At this point, I think maybe finding another job is easier than increasing our DR just to show it won't bump our keywords/pages much.

Their bottom line is "How is SEO getting us more leads/clients?" It's been 5 months of starting new campaigns and unfucking the previous agency's scaled AI content garbage diluting our site. But I hear about DR almost daily/weekly and it's driving me up a wall.

SidarJabari said:

our competitors can gain or lose ~1,000 backlinks and their DR doesn't move at all

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Put that in front of them as arithmetic rather than opinion, because that is what it is. DR runs on a log scale. Going 47 to 50 is not three more points of the work that got you to 47, it is closer to doubling the referring domain strength behind the entire profile.

Your competitor observation has the same root. Link count is not the input. What moves the number is the strength of the domains pointing at you, and most of those thousand links will be coming from domains already in their profile, which changes nothing.

The part I would change is the fight itself. You are arguing the metric is wrong and you are right, but that argument never lands, because DR is the only number they can read without you in the room. Give them a second number they already care about and put both on the same monthly page. Then let the lead line do the arguing. When DR crawls 47 to 48 and leads are up, the KPI quietly dies and you never had to win the debate.

Five months of undoing the previous agency belongs on that page too. Nobody counts cleanup unless you show it to them. @SidarJabari what does the lead number actually look like across those five months?

Hetneo said:

Put that in front of them as arithmetic rather than opinion, because that is what it is. DR runs on a log scale. Going 47 to 50 is not three more points of the work that got you to 47, it is closer to doubling the referring domain strength behind the entire profile.

Your competitor observation has the same root. Link count is not the input. What moves the number is the strength of the domains pointing at you, and most of those thousand links will be coming from domains already in their profile, which changes nothing.

The part I would change is the fight itself. You are arguing the metric is wrong and you are right, but that argument never lands, because DR is the only number they can read without you in the room. Give them a second number they already care about and put both on the same monthly page. Then let the lead line do the arguing. When DR crawls 47 to 48 and leads are up, the KPI quietly dies and you never had to win the debate.

Five months of undoing the previous agency belongs on that page too. Nobody counts cleanup unless you show it to them. @SidarJabari what does the lead number actually look like across those five months?

Click to expand...

Oh, believe me, I've been including these facts and figures in my bi-weekly SEO reports, but I can't tell whether it's falling on deaf ears.

I started in March, and by July I'd quadrupled organic signed clients compared to their monthly average (there were two fluke local and statewide events that influenced this, however, but still...) and not a single peep from them.

YoY/MoM and even quarter over quarter my numbers are 2-3x that of what the agency was doing. I remember the handoff when I started; I was on a call with the agency two weeks into the job and I asked them if anyone even bothered to check whether all the pages they were publishing were indexing (most weren't). It was just crickets on the call. Good stuff!

I think showing the progress of the cleanup (301 redirect/410 of garbage pages the agency made, rewriting pages worth keeping, etc.) seems to get any basic acknowledgement.

At any rate, I think I'll just work the job as hard as I can right now while simultaneously aggressively applying for other jobs. But we all know how the marketing economy is right now, especially for SEOs.