What is Domain Authority and How Can You Increase It?

Website owners and SEO teams everywhere will have heard of domain authority, also known as simply DA in SEO. It’s a metric often used to measure the results of digital marketing efforts and how relevant or reliable a website is to a particular industry or subject. There are things you can do to increase your authority, like building top-quality backlinks from reputable, authority sites that help signal that your website and content can be held in a similar esteem. The more linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. you have, the more likely you will have search engine success.

Where does domain authority come into all of this? Does it help your SEO? What is a good domain authority? Keep reading to find out more about this all-important metric, including how to check the domain authority of your site, how to increase domain authority, and whether Google uses it for rankings. It’s time to get stuck in!

What Is Domain Authority?

First, it’s important to explain domain authority, defining what it is and isn’t.

The metric isn’t to be confused with Google’s PageRank, which is the domain authority formula that the search engine giant uses to grade website authority. Once upon a time, this information was public knowledge, which lead to spammy link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. practices and the search engine results pages (SERPs) being easy to manipulate. Since then, PageRank has been kept under wraps.

This is where domain authority comes in. DA is an SEO metric developed by software company, Moz and is what we will be referring to in this guide. DA by Moz tells you how likely a domain will appear in the SERPs over competitors, taking into account its relevance and other factors.

The Moz metric gives you a domain authority score of 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest score and 1 being the lowest domain authority, meaning the weakest level of authority. Moz’s DA ranking score looks at more than just the number of backlinks to give you a more well-rounded and balanced score.

How Important Is Moz’s DA Metric For Ranking in Google?

If you’re wondering how important your website domain authority is for ranking highly in Google search results, then the truth is that Google doesn’t actually use DA as a ranking factor.

So why are we talking about it? Because to reach a domain authority score, it uses many of the same ranking factors that Google does, which makes it a good indicator for judging how your website performs in relation to your competitors in the SERPs.

In other words, the higher your or your competitors’ DA score is, the more likely the perspective websites are to rank highly in the results pages. While not directly used by Google, it’s still important.

What Does SEO Domain Authority Take Into Account?

To determine a website’s domain, Moz looks at a site’s backlink profile and general SEO performance.

These are some of the most important factors it looks at:

• Internal linking
• The number of unique domains linking to a website
• Total number of inbound links
• Social signals
• Quality of links
• Organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. per month

How To Check The Domain Authority Of Your Website

Doing a domain authority check is easy. You can use Moz’s free Link Explorer tool to get your DA score. After you’ve entered your URL, the tool will show you your DA and key information about how many external linking domains are pointing your way, how many inbound links, and the number of keywords you are ranking for within the top 50 positions on Google.

What Is A Good Domain Authority?

It’s natural that you’ll want to know what a good DA score looks like. However, as with many things in SEO, the answer isn’t straightforward. There is no defined number to aim for when it comes to your domain score. It all depends on your unique circumstances, industry and competitors.

Yes, Moz gives results from 1 to 100, with higher scores being viewed as better, but the truth is that what’s good and bad is subjective. DA is best used as a comparison tool between you and your competitors.

For example, say your business is a bespoke bakery specializing in handcrafted cakes by post. In this case, you wouldn’t be looking to compete with big food retailers like McDonald’s or Walmart, as it just isn’t realistic. Instead, you need to assess the DA scores of your direct competitors. If you find that they all have DA scores of between 30 and 40, a ‘good’ and realistic score for you to aim for might be around the 45 mark, which means you’ll have a better chance of ranking in the SERPs for search terms that are relevant to your business.

Using Domain Authority To Outrank Your Competitors

It’s helpful to look at your domain score as a general overview of how SEO-friendly your website is. Generally speaking, websites with a higher domain score will rank higher in the SERPs, and being aware of your competitors’ scores could help you leapfrog them.

For example, if your website has a DA score of 52 and you can’t seem to shift past the number 2 spot for a particular search term, you might want to check out the DA score for the first position website. On further inspection, you might learn that the number 1 position is held by a site with a domain ranking of 59, which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t that much better than your score.

With only 7 points between you and a little more research into what your competitor is doing that you aren’t, you should soon be able to get ahead with some simple tweaks like earning more authority backlinks and changes to your content.

Domain Authority and Page Authority

Where DA gives an overview of how SEO-friendly your overall website is, page authority (PA) assesses the strength of your individual pages when it comes to their ranking potential. This is another metric that Moz has developed to evaluate the likelihood of your separate pages ranking highly in the SERPs. It works on the same scoring basis as DA, issuing a score from 1 to 100. It doesn’t take into account important on-page elements, though, but it is still a good indicator.

How To Increase Domain Authority Score

Now you know what is domain authority and how to check for it and use it to outsmart your competitors, you’ll probably be thinking about how to increase domain authority to boost your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs. Here are the tips you can follow to do just that:

1. Ensure Your Site Follows SEO Best Practices

Making sure your website follows SEO best practices and on-page elements have been fully optimized is an important starting point for increasing your DA. You’ll also want to make sure your site works on mobile and offers an enjoyable user experience.

You can optimize your pages with:

• Meta descriptions
• Title tags
• Image alt tags
• Keywords

Carrying out a technical SEO audit is also useful as it can highlight any elements that could be holding your pages back from ranking, like mistakes in code.

2. Create Quality Content That People Want To Link To

Producing quality content that is helpful and people actually want to share and link to is another way to boost your website’s DA score. Remember, links can signal your website and blog authority in the eyes of Google. Refreshing your older content is also helpful as it keeps everything current and encourages search engines to crawl your site and push your content in the SERPs. Make sure your content offers something new to the reader and is carefully optimized with relevant keywords to encourage organic traffic your way.

3. Analyze Your Competitors

We’ve already mentioned how you can use DA scores to compare against your competitors and implement a plan to outsmart them. You can take this comparison a step further by analyzing their backlink profile, too! By doing this, you’ll be able to see where their links are coming from and use this to improve your own authority ranking by revealing new backlink opportunities. If you find they’re featured in an industry directory that you’re not, you could reach out to the same directory to get yourself included.

4. Broken Link Building

Another good (and quick!) way to send your DA score upward is broken link building. This approach to link building is a fast way for your website to take advantage of broken links and reap the rewards of that extra link juice. Essentially, broken link building looks for broken links on other websites that you can ‘fix’ by suggesting a site links to your equally relevant (or better) content instead.

5. Find Guest Posting Opportunities

Guest posts are a brilliant way to get quality links to your site. They’re hard work as they involve identifying relevant websites that accept guest posts, writing new content, and pitching to website admins with a focused, relationship-based approach to blogger outreach. Like many things in life, hard work pays off and securing guest post opportunities can do wonders for your backlink profile.

What Is Domain Authority And Using It To Your Advantage

DA may not be an official metric that Google uses to decide on its rankings, but it’s an important indicator of how successful your website might be in the SERPs. Great as a comparison tool to outrank your competitors, by implementing the tips in this blog, you will soon benefit from a higher DA score and better rankings in search results. Need help with this? Our comprehensive SEO services are here to help – get in touch today!