Improv­ing domain author­i­ty (DA) is essen­tial to any com­pre­hen­sive SEO strat­e­gy. With a top spot on Google’s SERPs promis­ing increased traf­fic, con­ver­sions, and over­all busi­ness suc­cess, it’s under­stand­able that com­pa­nies are ask­ing their mar­ket­ing teams to improve their web­sites’ domain authority.

Under­stand­ing the many fac­tors that can influ­ence DA is one in the same as learn­ing about Google’s com­plex rank­ing process. That’s why SEO strate­gists will include “domain author­i­ty” in their lists of spe­cialisms. Work­ing to raise DA is almost always accom­pa­nied by bet­ter SEO health and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efficiency.

So, how do you improve your domain author­i­ty? Bet­ter yet, how do you do it in a way that max­imis­es your resources and sup­ports your over­all mar­ket­ing objectives?

Well, we’ll be going over all you need to know. Let’s dive right in.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain author­i­ty (DA) is a rank­ing fac­tor cre­at­ed by Moz to help busi­ness­es deter­mine their rank­ing poten­tial on search engine results pages (SERPs). Accord­ing to Moz, DA is not part of Google’s algo­rithm and has no influ­ence on the SERPs.

Even though DA isn’t offi­cial­ly part of Google’s rank­ing sys­tem, there is still a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship between DA and oth­er SEO per­for­mance indi­ca­tors. So, DA isn’t a met­ric that direct­ly increas­es rank­ings; rather, it helps busi­ness­es gauge where they are in rela­tion to their com­peti­tors. This, in turn, allows busi­ness­es to adjust their efforts accordingly.

While DA is a cru­cial com­po­nent of a great SEO strat­e­gy, it’s impor­tant to take note of the following:

1. Because DA changes fre­quent­ly, you should­n’t rely on it to eval­u­ate your SEO per­for­mance over time; instead, use it for its orig­i­nal pur­pose — com­par­ing domains.

2. DA isn’t the only site author­i­ty met­ric. There are oth­er ways to under­stand your site’s rank­ing poten­tial. Oth­ers include Sem­rush’s Author­i­ty Score and Ahrefs Domain Rat­ing. The key is to pick one and use it to con­sis­tent­ly track your domain’s author­i­ty over time.

How is Domain Authority Calculated?

Domain author­i­ty is cal­cu­lat­ed by analysing mul­ti­ple fac­tors relat­ed to a domain’s link pro­file. As of 2019, Moz’s DA score reflects a machine learn­ing algo­rith­m’s pre­dic­tions about how often Google will use a cer­tain domain in its search results. Basi­cal­ly, a domain that ranks high in Google’s SERPs is expect­ed to have a high­er DA than one that doesn’t.

In a nut­shell, Moz’s 40 DA fac­tors con­sid­er the following:

• The over­all qual­i­ty of your link profile
• The vari­abil­i­ty of your back­links or the num­ber of root domains link­ing back to you
• The cred­i­bil­i­ty of the web­sites link­ing to your web­site (large rep­utable insti­tu­tions or organ­i­sa­tions pro­vide high­er scores)
• Your site struc­ture or how eas­i­ly it can be crawled by search engines
• Site friend­li­ness or how great of an expe­ri­ence your users have on your site
• Social sig­nals (the pop­u­lar­i­ty of your domain and con­tent on social media networks)

What Is a Good Domain Authority?

Put sim­ply; a good DA score is one that is high­er than the domains you want to out­rank. Because DA pre­dicts how well a site should be able to rank with­in the con­text of its unique com­pet­i­tive land­scape, scores can’t be clas­si­fied as strict­ly excel­lent, aver­age, or poor.

Instead, scores are rel­a­tive to one’s com­peti­tors. Your com­peti­tors are those sites that are with­in your tar­get SERPs. So, to deter­mine whether you have a good DA score, com­pare your score to your main com­peti­tors’ scores using Moz’s free domain analy­sis SEO tool.

If your web­site has a DA of 40 and that hap­pens to be high­er than that of your com­peti­tors, even though it’s still on the low­er end, your DA is rel­a­tive­ly ‘good’.

How­ev­er, if your DA is 60 and your com­peti­tors’ scores are above 80, your DA isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly ‘poor’, but you’ll def­i­nite­ly need to ramp up your efforts to out­rank them.

Why is Domain Authority Important?

Your DA score helps you deter­mine your rel­a­tive com­pet­i­tive­ness. This is impor­tant because:

It helps you choose keywords strategically

DA helps you under­stand where you can real­is­ti­cal­ly com­pete, allow­ing you to man­age your time and resources effec­tive­ly. If you’re com­pet­ing for a spe­cif­ic key­word against sites with domain author­i­ties sim­i­lar to yours, you’ll know that a well-writ­ten blog post stands a good chance of ranking.

But, if you’re com­pet­ing against sites with much high­er domain author­i­ties, it would be more pru­dent to tar­get a dif­fer­ent keyword.

It helps guide all your other marketing efforts

DA may not be an offi­cial rank­ing fac­tor, but it encom­pass­es all the things that are: Google’s peo­ple-first con­tent phi­los­o­phy and empha­sis on cred­i­bil­i­ty. As such, DA can also help guide all your oth­er mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Plus, the com­peti­tor focus encour­aged by DA analy­sis helps you iden­ti­fy and improve the areas of your own mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that need tweaking.

How To Improve Domain Authority

Since your domain author­i­ty score is based on many fac­tors, work­ing on off-page SEO (link-build­ing strate­gies) and on-page SEO (con­tent opti­mi­sa­tion) is more like­ly to increase your web­site’s DA and over­all SEO health.

Here are 5 ways you can improve your web­site’s domain authority:

1. Audit your links

A site’s link pro­file is undoubt­ed­ly the most impor­tant met­ric for DA. The ben­e­fits of a good link pro­file are 1) high­er DA scores and 2) more cred­i­bil­i­ty and bet­ter rank­ings. There­fore, audit­ing your links is the best place to start.

First­ly, ensure that links to your web­site are valid and that they aren’t spam­my or the result of black-hat SEO tac­tics. If you have lots of spam­my links with spam scores high­er than 30%, this will affect your DA.

To keep your link pro­file in great con­di­tion, these links should be removed or dis­avowed. It’s good to ensure that any domains you’re link­ing to aren’t spam­my, either. When in doubt, use the “no fol­low” link attribute.

2. Analyse your competitors

The key advan­tages of com­peti­tor analy­sis are 1) iden­ti­fy­ing areas of improve­ment and 2) gath­er­ing valu­able insights to guide your mar­ket­ing efforts. So, iden­ti­fy your key com­peti­tors and analyse their link pro­files. What kind of back­links do they have, and can you get sim­i­lar ones?

3. Prioritise link building

Link build­ing refers to the prac­tice of secur­ing qual­i­ty back­links to increase vis­i­bil­i­ty and author­i­ty in organ­ic search results. Link build­ing can be chal­leng­ing, as you some­times can­not con­trol which web­sites link back to you.

How­ev­er, it’s impor­tant not to resort to black hat strate­gies, such as buy­ing back­links or engag­ing in oth­er spam­my link tac­tics. These can get you penalised and undo months of hard work. Below are some of the most com­mon link-build­ing strate­gies used to improve DA:

Guest blog­ging

Pro­vid­ing blog con­tent, research, or any kind of Thought Lead­er­ship con­tent to rel­e­vant high-DA web­sites in your indus­try can get you rel­e­vant back­links and raise your DA. So, search for high-author­i­ty pub­lish­ers in your field who are on the look­out for con­tent and expertise.

Nat­ur­al link building

When you focus on cre­at­ing high-qual­i­ty con­tent that ranks and demon­strates thought lead­er­ship, you’re more like­ly to earn back­links from blog­gers and oth­er busi­ness­es. This process is known as nat­ur­al link build­ing and is one of the best ways to improve your link pro­file. To increase your chances of earn­ing back­links, cre­ate research con­tent or con­tent that is orig­i­nal, rel­e­vant, and key­word targeted.

Remem­ber, the goal is to stand out from your com­peti­tors by pro­vid­ing bet­ter-qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion. You can increase your back­link­ing poten­tial by shar­ing your con­tent with your sub­scribers and social media fol­low­ers. Reach­ing out to oth­er sites and ask­ing them to read and link to your con­tent is anoth­er great way to earn more backlinks.

Dig­i­tal Pub­lic Relations

Invest­ing in PR allows you to earn back­links in well-known pub­li­ca­tions. Since these pub­li­ca­tions tend to have very high DA scores, hav­ing them link back to you can boost your DA scores. Ser­vices such as HARO can help you find high-qual­i­ty link­ing opportunities.

These plat­forms work by con­nect­ing you with jour­nal­ists and pub­lish­ers who are look­ing to fea­ture experts in their arti­cles. Although place­ment isn’t always guar­an­teed, you can increase your chances of get­ting a back­link by pro­vid­ing quick, valu­able insights.

Bro­ken link building

Bro­ken back­links to your site are good link-build­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, as they can usu­al­ly be fixed by reach­ing out to those domains and ask­ing them to add the links to your web­site again.

Alter­na­tive­ly, they can also be fixed on your end by ensur­ing the orig­i­nal sources are made live again.

Oth­er web­sites’ bro­ken links can be great oppor­tu­ni­ties too. Con­duct a bro­ken link audit of web­sites with a high DA and see if you can pro­vide them with bet­ter con­tent to link back to. With this approach, every­one wins: the bro­ken link is fixed, and you receive a rel­e­vant, high-qual­i­ty back­link with­out hav­ing to write a whole blog post.

Focus on qual­i­ty backlinks

To improve your DA score, focus on secur­ing qual­i­ty links and elim­i­nat­ing bad ones. Moz’s updat­ed DA score looks at whether links come from actu­al sites with real traf­fic. So, not every link is worth pur­su­ing. In fact, spam­my, low-qual­i­ty links are like­ly to be dis­count­ed by domain author­i­ty met­rics and Google.

It’s worth not­ing that ‘bad’ does­n’t mean low author­i­ty; low-author­i­ty links can still add val­ue to your link profile.

Busi­ness listings

If you’re a small, local busi­ness, list­ing your domain across dig­i­tal busi­ness direc­to­ries, such as Google Busi­ness Pro­file and Yelp, can do won­ders for vis­i­bil­i­ty and cus­tomer acqui­si­tion. As most of these local list­ings allow you to include a link to your web­site, they can also help increase your traf­fic and DA scores.

4. On-page optimisation

On-page SEO involves opti­mis­ing your web­site and con­tent. The more user-friend­ly and rel­e­vant your web­site is, the greater the chances your con­tent earns back­links. Here’s how to opti­mise your con­tent for a bet­ter DA score:

Fol­low Google’s peo­ple-first qual­i­ty guide­lines: Exper­tise, Author­i­ta­tive­ness, and Trust­wor­thi­ness (E‑A-T) when cre­at­ing content.

• Incor­po­rate the right key­words into your con­tent naturally
• Use inter­nal links to help search engines crawl and index your con­tent more efficiently
• For­mat and struc­ture your con­tent appropriately
• Update your con­tent regularly

When it comes to opti­mis­ing your web­site, focus on per­for­mance and user-friend­li­ness. Make sure that the tech­ni­cal SEO aspects of your web­site are run­ning smooth­ly, as these can affect your domain author­i­ty and rank­ings. Slow sites tend to have high­er bounce rates

(which is unfavourable for your rank­ings); to pre­vent this, ensure that your web­site loads quickly.

With mobile search­es dom­i­nat­ing all search­es, mobile friend­li­ness has nev­er been more impor­tant. Google’s mobile-first index makes this clear. If your web­site isn’t mobile-friend­ly, this will affect your Google rank­ings and DA scores. Make use of Google’s Mobile-Friend­ly Test to analyse your web­site and fol­low the rec­om­men­da­tions on how to make it more mobile-friendly.

5. Leverage social media

As high-rank­ing pages tend to have many likes, shares, or tweets, there is a strong cor­re­la­tion between high-rank­ing pages and social sig­nals. Increas­ing your fol­low­ers and hav­ing an active social media pres­ence ensures that your con­tent gets trac­tion — and more back­link­ing opportunities.

How Long Does It Take to Increase Domain Authority?

You could see an increase in your DA score in a few months; how­ev­er, you should be will­ing to play the long game. Rais­ing your DA involves improv­ing your site’s SEO health and focus­ing on the qual­i­ty of your link pro­file — all of which take time.

Addi­tion­al­ly, DA works on a log­a­rith­mic scale, so it’s much eas­i­er to raise your DA score from 20 to 30 than it is to raise it from 70 to 80. This means you’ll need to work hard­er (and longer) to achieve a high­er DA score.

Final thoughts

Domain author­i­ty can be dif­fi­cult to influ­ence direct­ly, so a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary approach tends to yield bet­ter results. Grant­ed, that makes rais­ing your DA score a lot more chal­leng­ing, but ulti­mate­ly your efforts will pay off. Instead of aim­ing for a per­fect score, it’s far more ben­e­fi­cial to con­sid­er your rel­a­tive score and how it fits into your over­all mar­ket­ing strategy.

After all, a busi­ness that pri­ori­tis­es growth and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion is more like­ly to suc­ceed in the long run.

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