What is Domain Authority? and why is it important?

In a nut shell, Domain Authority is the metric by which search engines rank the relevance and significance of your website. It is a search engine ranking score that predicts a website’s ability to rank on search engine results page. 

Domain authority consists of multiple factors such as number of inbound and outbound links, number of keywords a website ranks in the top 50, age and user-experience. 

Domain authority is ranked from 1-100, with 100 being the highest. It is also key to note that its a logarithmic scale, hence when your domain authority is high, it is much harder to raise it. For instance, increasing your DA from 80 to 90 is far more difficult that increasing from 25 to 35.

Domain Authority was developed by Moz to mimic Google’s quality score. Think of DA as a manner of evaluating how competitive a website is in a Google search. It is a comparative score. This means if websites with a score of 100 get more optimized, their score does not increase but every other websites score decreases. 

This is why it is so important to keep track of your DA and the DA of your competitors. You don’t need an extremely high DA, you only need a DA higher than all your competitors. Having a higher domain authority ensures your website consistently outranks other websites in your niche. 

How to check Domain Authority?

There are various tools out there to check your domain authority, but i highly recommend using Moz directly. Here is an example of the Moz domain statistics for one of my clients: 

Step 1: Link Building Campaign

There are multiple facets of link building campaigns. These facets when used in conjunction can produce enormous boosts in DA. 

• Get more links to your site:  Earn as many backlinks as you can, but make sure those links are from high-quality sites. Try to avoid using automated methods, because having a high amount of low-quality backlinks will do more harm than good.
• Create an internal link structure: This is the easiest facet of link building to control. Ensure every post is linked to 3 or more other posts on your blog, and when you publish a new blog post, ensure to retroactively link from your previous posts. This has the added benefit of passing link juice from old posts to new ones. 
• Diversify your link profile: Links from various geo-locations, domain extensions, and sources which are not interconnected increase informational index of your website. So instead of getting links from a few sites, focus on earning quality links from a diverse array of sources

Step 2: Create High-Quality Keyword Rich Content

Create content you know your target demographic will be interested in. Do your research, find out what questions your target demographic is asking and create content that answers. 

The quality of your articles is far more than the quantity. Low quality content that does not help anybody will have a higher bounce rate. A high bounce rate will cause your content to rank lower and your DA to drop. Publishing only 2-3 high quality posts a week is far more effective than publishing 7 posts of mediocre or low-quality content.

Ensure your content is packed full of your target keywords, this will let search engines know who your content will be relevant to. I always recommend getting a designated SEO Editor to optimize all your content before you publish it. 

Step 3: On-Page SEO

How optimized your website is, controls factors such as how easy it is for search engine bots to crawl your site, where the link juice passes through, and how user-centric your content and site navigation are. 

Here are a few tips to optimize pages on your website: 

• Have a site map link in your footer and in your robots.txt file
• Keep your Meta title and Meta description of your homepage updated
• Maintain proper heading hierarchy in your blog posts. This guide is a great resource on proper header management 

Step 4: Social Media Marketing

Having proper social media distribution channels plays major role in the ranking of your content. Ensure your brand and your blogs have a presence across all social media platforms relevant to your industry.

Ensure your content is engaging and would elicit users to share it. Increasing traffic from social channels boosts your ranking and improves indexing. 

Step 5: Faster loading speed

Google has explicitly stated page load time is a ranking factor, you read the official blog post here. You can use multiple web tools to check the existing load time of your site. The rule of thumb is, if your site is not done loading in 3 seconds, you should start working on speed optimization. 

Here are some quick tips to make your site load faster: 

• Use a CDN to serve your content
• Compress and optimize your images before uploading them
• Only use proven hosting companies

Bonus tip

Domain authority checker gets an update every 1-2 months. So within 30-60 days of applying these steps you should be able to observe significant boosts in your domain authority.