On the surface, Domain Authority (DA) appears pretty straightforward. It’s simply a metric to measure the authority of any website. To many, this number seems like a golden ticket to ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and attaining maximum organic traffic.
If you’re trying to grow your website, your next question should be: How to increase my domain authority? The easiest ways to boost domain authority include building highly relevant and authoritative links to your homepage and optimising your website. Of course, there’s more to it than this!
Follow along as we demystify Domain Authority, answer all your burning questions, and help you leverage this powerful metric for your own website.
How to Increase My Domain Authority?
Before we reveal all the tips and tricks for increasing your DA, it’s important to understand domain authority and what it means for your website.
UNDERSTANDING DOMAIN AUTHORITY
The concept of ranking domains based on a factor known as authority was first implemented in PageRank by Larry Page. Over the years, other platforms have released their own metrics to indicate the importance of web pages.
One of those metrics is Domain Authority (DA) which was created by Moz. DA is a search engine ranking score that tells us how likely a website is to rank on the SERPs. The higher the DA, the more likely your website is to rank. DA scores are based on a scale of 0 to 100.
It should be noted that the DA is simply a tool to measure competitiveness and predict success. It’s not based on the real ranking data by Google and shouldn’t be taken as the ultimate measure of success. With that being said, it can help you choose keywords strategically and track your performance for continuous growth.
HOW IS DOMAIN AUTHORITY MEASURED?
The DA scores range from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale. This means that it gets progressively harder to improve your DA as you climb up the scale. For example, it’s easier to go from a DA of 20 to 30 than it is to go from DA 70 to 80.
Moz has revealed that DA is measured based on 40 signals including the number of incoming links, the quality and relevance of links, the quality of content, and much more.
HOW TO CHECK YOUR DOMAIN AUTHORITY?
It might take a while for you to understand DA but checking it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Here’s what you have to do:
1. Open up Moz’s free Domain Analysis SEO Tool on your browser
2. Enter your chosen domain
3. Evaluate the results!
IS YOUR DOMAIN AUTHORITY GOOD OR BAD?
Now that you’ve found the DA of your website, you must be wondering if it’s good or bad. So, what should your DA be and what qualifies as ‘good’? The answer is pretty subjective. We’ve mentioned before that DA is a score for comparison and measurement of competitiveness.
Google may have a DA of 94 but yours doesn’t need to be that high. Why? Because you’re not competing against Google! Good domain authority is what matches your competitors.
To find out if your DA is good or not, all you have to do is check out your competitor’s DA. If yours is higher, you’re on the right track. However, if your DA comes out to be lower, then you have to put in more work to beat the competition.
OTHER WAYS TO MEASURE YOUR WEBSITE’S AUTHORITY
While Domain Authority has become a gold standard over the years, there are many other metrics to measure the authority or reputation of your website. Some of the most popular ones include:
– Domain Rating by Ahrefs
– Flow Metric by Majestic which includes trust flow and citation flow
It should be noted that these metrics are not interchangeable. A website that has a Moz DA of 51 might have a domain rating of 76. It’s important to be consistent with whatever ranking score you wish to work on.
Ways to Improve DA
Now that you know how to measure and compare DA, it’s time to work on increasing it. Here are some tried and tested ways of improving your website’s DA:
BUILD RELEVANT LINKS TO YOUR HOMEPAGE
One of the best ways to boost your website’s domain authority is by building high authority, relevant links to your homepage. Since each backlink is a vote of confidence for your website, having more authoritative backlinks pointing to your homepage can increase the DA.
To achieve these results, you need links from websites that have similar or greater DA than yours. Since DA is not linear, the higher the DA of the webpage, the more valuable it is for you in terms of earning a backlink.
How Many Backlinks Do You Need?
A commonly asked question is how many backlinks do you need to achieve a certain domain rating? It all depends on your competitors and the keywords you want to rank for.
To get started, simply look up your competitors’ metrics on Ahrefs or any other tool of your choice. On Ahrefs, you will be able to view the total backlinks, referring domains, and other data associated with the page. What we’re interested in are the do-follow referring domains of the competitor’s website.
Referring domains are the unique domains linking to the target and Do-follow links are ones that contribute to the increase in domain authority or overall ranking.
Once you have an idea of how many do-follow referring domains your competitor has, you can estimate the number of links you’ll need to match their DA.
It should be noted that this is by no means a fully accurate measure of the referring domain gap. Since the quality of links is a huge factor, sometimes one high-quality link can trump hundreds of low-quality ones. However, it can certainly give you a rough ballpark figure for the number of links you need to build in order to improve your website’s DA.
OPTIMISE AND STRUCTURE YOUR WEBSITE
Apart from building high-quality backlinks to your homepage, you can increase your DA by optimising and structuring your website the right way. Here are some things you can try:
Improve your Technical SEO: Having your technical SEO right from the beginning can help you score a higher DA and better rankings.
Optimise Page Speed: Website’s that load faster are considered more user-friendly and usually rank higher.
Make it Mobile-Friendly: In 2021, mobile searches accounted for more than half of the website traffic worldwide. Making your website mobile-friendly is now mandatory as it not only improves user experience but also serves as a ranking factor on Google.
OTHER TIPS FOR IMPROVING DA
At this point, you’re probably well aware of the importance of building high-quality backlinks, especially when it comes to boosting your DA.
Here are some additional practises you can engage in to supercharge your domain authority:
Focus on Quality Content: Create high-quality, relevant and link-worthy content that others would love linking back to.
Use Promotional Tactics: Don’t wait for your content to be discovered. Take a proactive role in promoting it through social media, email lists, and more. The goal is to attract as many eyeballs as you can to build relationships and get new link building opportunities.
Consult a Professional Link Building Agency: If you’re new to the world of link building, it can be useful to consult industry professionals. At OutreachMama, we provide a holistic link building experience through real outreach and relationship building. Our link audits can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses to reach the DA you’re dreaming of.
How to Boost Domain Authority: In Closing
Much like any other metric, domain authority is a great way to measure your progress and predict success. DA simply shows you how strong your website is based on a collection of factors in the Moz database.
It’s useful to remember that a low DA is not an indicator of failure just as a high DA does not guarantee success. If you keep your eyes on the prize by increasing link building efforts, optimising your website, and focusing on quality over quantity, a higher DA and better rankings will come naturally!