Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is used by businesses to analyse if their SEO strategy is working or not.

When first coming across the term domain authority, you might have questions such as:

But what does Domain Authority mean?

Is Domain Authority worth improving?

Does a high domain authority help your ranking on Google?

Although Domain authority is not a Google ranking factor, it can be useful to know how yours compares to your competitors.

In this post we learn:

What a domain authority is
How to check your domain authority
How to build your domain authority

So, keep reading.

What is domain authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is the chances of your domain ranking on the SERPs compared to your competitors.

But, domain authority is not a ranking factor that Google uses to determine how and where your website or web pages should rank.

So therefore, domain authority will not increase your chances of ranking in the SERPs (search engine results page).

However, to evaluate your website’s performance compared to your competitors, domain authority is a good metric to use.

A metric originally developed by Moz.

And now, SEO tools like SEMrush have developed their own domain authority scoring system.

A few examples of the data SEMrush uses for their domain authority score is:

Backlinks
Referring domains
Search traffic

So, use the domain authority metric to evaluate how your website compares to your competition.

Just remember, it isn’t an official ranking factor used by Google.

What’s a good domain authority score?

Domain Authority is ranked from 1 to 100, if the search engine ranking score is higher then the domain has a better chance of ranking at the top of SERPs.

The metrics SEO tool use to determine this domain authority score are:

The number of backlinks to your webpage
The quality of links that your webpage receives

Pages with backlinks from sources with high authority, increase your domain authority score.

Examples of high authority sources include:

Google
Wikipedia
Governmental pages
Renowned newspapers or magazines

But, some backlinks will be more effective and useful than others, depending on the type of industry or the attributes of your website.

For example, an online educational website would benefit with backlinks from:

national newspapers
Universities
academic articles
government sites

However, a local business website, would benefit if their backlinks came from:

regional newspapers
industry magazines

Even if the local business website didn’t have a high domain authority, backlinks from the above examples would be more valuable for their target audience.

Basically, domain authority is:

Depends on the type of business
Different for each business

So, analyse and target the backlinks of competitors similar in rankings to your website.

Then, once your rankings improve, then repeat the process.

How can I check my Domain Authority?

You can check your website’s domain authority using Moz’s Link Explorer, for free.

Just enter your domain URL, for example, yourwebsite.co.uk and then wait for your web page’s domain authority score to appear.

A few examples of other features offered by Moz’s Link Explorer are:

Linking Domains: the number of unique backlink domains
Inbound Links: the number of unique pages linking to your pages
Ranking Keywords: the number of keywords your website ranks for in Google’s top 50

Domain Authority vs. Page Authority

The difference between Domain Authority and Page Authority is:

Domain Authority is your website’s chances of ranking in the SERPs.
Page Authority is the individual pages of your website’s chances of ranking in the SERPs.

Page Authority allows you to see how each page is performing.

For example, pages such as individual blog posts or product pages.

And this gives you the chance to analyse which pages might need further optimisation for a higher score.

Also, with the page authority, you can prioritise which pages need optimising before others and develop a better plan of action for your digital strategy.

How to Build Domain Authority

Now, to build domain authority and rank better than your competitors, the number of backlinks to your website is not important.

As Google has stated, what’s important is to have quality links that are relevant and help search engines understand what your website is about.

A few ways to gain Domain Authority include:

Quality over quantity: Focus on relevant backlinks, not the number of links.
Analyse and make sure your backlinks have a do-follow.
Produce high-quality content to attract natural backlinks.
Focusing your content on attracting your target audience, helps it go viral.
Update old content: Add new information to pages with unindexed content or low page authority score.
Identify and compare yourself to your competitors: Analyse the things you’re not doing.
Find out where your competitors get backlinks from: Get the same or similar backlinks
Spread your web content: Through different channels like social media or newsletters.

Conclusion

To build your website’s Domain Authority takes time.

Domain Authority building is a long-term strategy and you don’t see results straight away.

But, following these tips on will help you:

Increase your websites search engine rankings
Increase traffic to your website
Attract quality website visitors
Attract a larger number of website visitors
Increase your website domain authority score

So, now it’s your turn.

Let me know your go to method for increasing your domain authority.

Especially if it’s not on my current list!

Let me know in the comments below.