You’ve worked hard at your SEO strategy and you want to know how well your website will rank in search engine results. Domain Authority (DA), is a popular metric to predict your site’s SERPs. Before we go any further, don’t confuse DA with PA, Page Authority. Domain authority estimates your website’s ability to bring in organic traffic from Google. PA is the ranking potential of a single page on your site. Both these metrics allow marketers to analyse and improve their site’s authority, build dominance and increase their SERPs. The bonus is you can also monitor your competitors DA. If ranking high on Google is important to your business, you need to understand what it takes to achieve a good domain authority.
What is Domain Authority?
The first thing you need to understand about DA is that it isn’t a ranking factor for Google. What it does is predict what your ranking would be making it essential for marketers. In can provide insights into your marketing strategy and can be a measure of the success of your SEO activities.
Domain Authority takes into account a number of factors including:
- Quality and quantity of your backlinking
- Root domains, the number of unique websites linking back to yours
- Quality of content including the relevance and usefulness of your site’s content
- How much content is on your site
- Amount of social signals
- How well organised your site structure is and overall user experience like loading speed
- How optimised your site is for search engines.
DA is calculated by a machine-learning algorithm that will evaluate your site’s link profile in comparison to your competitors.
Why You Need to Know Your Domain Authority
If it’s not useful in increasing your rankings, why should you care about DA?
Here’s how marketers use it:
- To understand how competitive your site is with others in your industry
- To check your marketing campaigns ROI
- To determine how competitors are doing, discover who is in your niche, and identify ways to better position your brand
- To improve your SEO
- To find good domain authority sites that you could backlink with.
What is a Good Score?
Your DA score is relative to the industry you are in. A good domain authority will depend on your niche and competitors. Here’s an average overview of DA scores:
1-10 If you’re not a new site, then you need to fix this!
11-30 Not the best, but growing in authority
31-50 Moderate, decent potential
51-70 Excellent authority and competitive ranking
71-100 Top of the class! High authority, dominating search rankings
Essentially you want to be higher than your competitors. If your competitors are in the 31-50 range and you’re over 50, then you’re doing well.
How to Check Your Website’s Domain Authority
There are a number of SEO tools that can help you easily check your DA. Here are some of the most popular ones:
- Moz Link Explore
- SEMrush Authority Score
- Ahref’s Domain Rating
- Ubersuggest
- Small SEO Tools DA Checker
These tools will give you insights into your domain authority and will often measure your page authority and backlink profile.
How to Improve Your Site’s Domain Authority
Like all SEO activities, improving your DA is a long-term strategy that relies on a number of SEO best practices. Here are some important steps to improve your domain authority:
Backlinking
High quality backlinks are a key factor in DA calculations. Find high-authority sites relevant to your niche and find ways to get backlinks. This might include:
- Paid for PR placements
- Guest posting
- Linkable resources like eBooks, infographics, whitepapers
- Fixing broken links on other sites with replacement content from you.
- Remove broken backlinks. This also includes removing spammy, toxic or low quality backlinks that hurt your DA. Check your Google Search Console to identify these links.
Need help developing high-quality, unique content for your backlinking strategy? Speak to the team at Contentworks.
Leverage on-page SEO
Make sure your site’s on-page SEO is fit. Optimise meta tags, use internal linking to spread out page authority, optimise image size and alt tags, use structured data to improve content readability.
Optimise site structure
A fast loading, well structured site helps search engines crawl efficiently and improves user experience. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check your site’s speed. Make sure your site is responsive to all devices and have a clear navigation structure to lower bounce rates.
Create quality content
High-quality content is critical in building a good domain authority. Aim to publish long-form content like eBooks, white papers, case studies, how to guides etc. Use the right keywords and let them work naturally in your content. Make sure to update old content, and encourage social sharing.
Promote your brand on social media
Social signals might not directly impact your DA, but they can amplify your brand in search results, generate traffic to your site and build brand awareness. Brand mentions on social media can also enhance backlinking opportunities. Share content across your social media channels, engage in forums and groups in your niche, and build relationships with influencers for possible backlinks.
Increase credibility and domain age
The older your domain, usually the higher the DA as you’ve established authority. Make sure you maintain a consistent posting schedule, shy-away from black hat SEO tactics and secure your site with https.
How Long Will it Take to Improve Domain Authority
As we mentioned above, improving your DA requires consistent effort over time. How long it takes depends on how much focus you put on publishing authoritative content, building quality backlinks and improving the overall health of your SEO and website.
Here are some realistic variables to aim for, depending on your sector:
- 5-10 points improvement can take a few months
- 20 points or more may take 6+months of ongoing efforts.
Rocking Your Authority
While not a direct factor in ranking for Google, a good domain authority score is a benchmark for your SEO performance. High quality content and backlinks plus best SEO practices can increase your search engine rankings in relation to your competitors. Consistent, long-term effort will increase your DA, bring more organic traffic to your site and outrank competitors.
Assessing your DA is easy to do using any of the tools mentioned in this article. If you need a comprehensive technical SEO audit of your website, assistance with your strategy or with developing authoritative content, book a 15-minute zoom with the expert team at Contentworks.