Google considers hundreds of factors when determining a website’s search engine ranking. The use of domain authority of a website is one that has become increasingly important over time. In this blog, you will learn how to increase your Domain Authority and why it matters.
What is Domain Authority?
If you Google Domain Authority, the first page of results will be from Moz, the search engine optimization (SEO) professionals who created the Domain Authority score. On a scale of 1 to 100, Moz Domain Authority was established to help website owners determine how likely their site is to rank in the SERPs. The greater your Domain Authority score, the higher your chances of ranking on SERPs — and thereby winning new clients.
Why does Domain Authority matter?
Although Google does not utilize domain authority in their rankings, Ahrefs discovered a link between DA and SERP ranking in a study. The findings of this study imply that DA could be a useful indicator for estimating how much organic traffic you’ll get from Google.
Consider increasing your domain authority plan if you want to improve your SEO ranks. However, developing authority can take time, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t see benefits immediately.
What is a Good Domain Authority Score?
Domain authority is calculated using a variety of parameters. However, to give you an idea, Google, Apple, and Microsoft all have high DA (between 95 and 100). If your website is fresh, on the other hand, your DA will be low (possibly between 10 to 20).
It’s also worth noting that increasing your site’s DA from 20 to 30 is easier than increasing it from 70 to 80. Consider the following ranges to determine what constitutes a good domain authority:
- Below 30 is poor
- 30 to 40 is below average
- 40 to 50 is average
- 50 to 60 is good
- 60 to 70 is very good
- Above 80 is excellent
It’s important to remember that DA can assist you forecast how well your website will perform in search results. So, instead of using it to compare your website to others in the SERPs, you should aim to boost your DA to improve your ranking.
How is Domain Authority Calculated?
Different tools have different methodologies for calculating domain authority. Moz calculates your DA score based on over 40 key parameters.
However, the following are the most crucial factors:
Moz Rank – The number of websites that link to a web page is counted. It also considers the quality of the websites that link back to your site.
Link Profile – Internal and external links from the web page are included. So, if your content has links to high-authority websites and is also connected to by other respectable websites, you’ll earn a good score.
Root Domains – Moz considers the amount of unique backlinks while evaluating your link profile. Assume you have 100 links coming from a single source. This will be counted as one root domain by Moz. As a result, obtaining backlinks from other websites is critical.
MozTrust – Moz verifies the legitimacy of websites that link to your page. You’ll get a high score if you get a link from a university webpage, a government website, or a huge organization website, for example.
Site Structure and User Friendliness – You must ensure that your site structure is simple for search engines like Google to index your pages in order to achieve a high DA. You must also create an excellent user experience for your visitors.
What Is Page Authority?
Your website has multiple pages that are all under the same domain or subdomain. The ranking power of your domain or subdomain is measured by Domain Authority, whereas Page Authority, or PA, is a score assigned to individual pages. Because PA reveals a single page’s ranking potential or performance, having more pages with a high PA increases your DA automatically.
What Are the Benefits of Page Authority and Domain Authority?
The amount, quality, and relevancy of connections to your website from reliable sources are the most important factors impacting DA. Backlinks are what they’re called.
Backlinks aid search engine algorithms in trusting your site, deeming your pages to be of high quality, and therefore qualifying you for higher positions. A high PA and DA indicates that authoritative websites are endorsing you by referring back to you, and this “link juice” boosts your own PA and DA.
How Do You Check Your Domain Authority?
Moz built the Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool, an online Domain Authority checker that displays your DA as well as other valuable SEO metrics including top pages by links, top-linking domains, and top-ranking keywords.
Moz also built Link Explorer, an online Page Authority tool. Individual URLs for your PA, DA, connecting domains, top-followed links to your site, and more can be inspected this way.
The Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority checkers are just two of many options; you should be able to verify Domain Authority and Page Authority in a simple and straightforward manner.
How To Build Domain Authority
What is a good Domain Authority and what is a good Page Authority? are identical: There is no standard for what constitutes a “good” DA or PA, therefore you must assess how well your site is performing in light of your specific competitive environment. Aiming for a high Moz Domain Authority, on the other hand, is beneficial because it increases the likelihood of your site ranking in the SERPs.
There’s a lot that goes into increasing Domain Authority, but the simple line is that you need to get links from other websites. The goal is to build a strong backlink profile for your site, which includes increasing the amount of backlinks to your site, targeting high DA referring domains that can pass on link juice or ranking strength to your site, and driving traffic to your site all at the same time.
How to Leverage DA and PA:
- Examine your previous Domain Authority. It’s also critical to examine Domain Authority on a frequent basis and to compare your year-over-year outcomes using historical Domain Authority. Tracking and analyzing your online performance is always beneficial.
- Concentrate your efforts on pages with a high Page Authority. Any article explaining Moz Page Authority will tell you to optimize and promote your best-performing pages. Analyzing changes in your PA can even reveal how much link juice was delivered on to you from a referring domain.
- Improve your digital marketing efforts with data. You can look at the pages with the highest PA, uncover patterns, and use them to your advantage. You could promote a popular blog post to a larger audience or devote more resources to a marketing strategy that increases backlinks to a specific page.
How to Increase Domain Authority
As you start working on increasing the domain authority of your website, keep in mind that this is a long-term plan. Here are some suggestions for increasing your site’s DA:
- Consider Guest Posting
If there is a value exchange, a website will most likely connect to you, and in today’s digital world, content reigns supreme. Guest blogging entails submitting a keyword-optimized piece to an authoritative website with a contextually placed link to your website. Website owners are enticed to comply because they have very little labor to perform in exchange for a blog article.
When compared to writing a great blog post on your own site and possibly being quoted or utilized as a source (and getting a backlink organically), outreach campaigns or directly contacting website owners is a much faster way to gain connections to your site.
- Audit Your Site and Remove Bad Links
While having good inbound links is important for your website’s DA and ranks, having bad connections can cause more harm than good. The domain authority of your website may be lowered as a result of links from a spammy website. It can even result in a Google penalty in rare situations.
To prevent this from happening, conduct a site audit and remove any poisonous connections as soon as feasible. By browsing through your website’s comprehensive link profile, you can utilize several SEO tools to discover bad links.
- Optimize Your Website Structure and User Experience
Remember that your site’s structure and user-friendliness were factors in determining domain authority. Search engines can quickly crawl your web pages and index them in search results if they have a good structure.
You can generate a sitemap in WordPress to aid search engine crawlers. A sitemap lists all of your vital pages and makes it easier for search engines to traverse your site.
When it comes to improving your site’s user experience, you should start by focusing on mobile optimization. Google has switched to a mobile-first approach, which means it will evaluate your website’s performance on mobile devices. As a result, it’s critical that your site works well on mobile devices and loads rapidly.
Then you must make certain that your website is secure. Obtain SSL certificates and convert your site to HTTPS to accomplish this. You may also get hold of the top WordPress security plugins, such as Sucuri, which has a web application firewall among its many capabilities.
- Improve Your Internal Links
Focusing on your internal link structure is another technique to improve your site’s user experience. You can keep your visitors interested and lower the bounce rate by providing links to additional informative pages on your site.
Internal links also make crawling your website easier for search engine bots, which aids in indexing your content.
Another advantage of having a good internal link structure is that link juice is sent from one page to the next.
The value of a page sent to other webpages is referred to as link juice in SEO. It provides the search engine a vote of confidence, as more links going to a page indicate that it is trustworthy. All of these contribute to a higher domain authority.
- Quality Over Quantity
Because search engines can distinguish between good and poor links, not every link to your site will benefit you. Some criteria algorithms evaluate when evaluating the quality of your backlinks are topic and industry relevance. You must actively seek out good connections and conduct backlink audits to eliminate poor ones. You should also make sure that your outreach initiatives are directed at sites that can convey vital link juice.
Bottom Line
You should keep in mind that you have no control on your site’s domain authority. All you have to do now is set the pieces in the correct order so that your DA continuously rises. It’s also worth noting that increasing domain authority takes time and won’t happen instantly. As a result, devise a long-term strategy and apply the tips we’ve provided to boost your DA.
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