Domain Authority (DA) is a number that indicates the authority of your website. Have you been wondering how to increase the authority of your website so that you can reap its benefits?
While high authority is not a direct website ranking factor, some of the strategies you use to increase your website’s domain authority may, in turn, increase your rankings on SERPs.
This article will explain what website’s authority is and what factors might influence it.
What Is Domain Authority & Page Authority in SEO?
Domain Authority: The DA of a website refers to a score between 0-100 that indicates how well a website will rank on search engines. The higher the domain score, the better for the website. The key takeaway here is that a domain authority score is a number that represents the entire domain.
Page Authority: On the other hand, page authority is a score used to predict the individual page score of a website. Instead of covering the entire domain, the page authority is specific to a single page.
Why Is Domain Authority Important for SEO?
Domain Authority (DA) is significant for SEO since it accurately reflects a website’s capacity for ranking. Search engines use this score to assess a website’s potential for traffic generation and its relevancy to the search phrase.
With SEO, a website with a high DA typically performs better than one having a low DA. The following are some advantages of higher website’s authority for SEO:
- Higher website rankings
- Generates more traffic for your site
- Increases search engine visibility
- Creates a stronger domain for SEO
- Attracts higher quality backlinks
What Is a Good Domain Authority Score?
A website’s authority score could highly impact its rankings on search engine result pages. The higher your authority score, the better your search engine rankings.
As a result, a DA score up to 40 is considered ordinary, 50+ is considered good, 70+ is considered very good, and 80+ is considered great.
DA uses a logarithmic scale: This indicates that increasing your DA score from 20 to 30 is easier than increasing it from 70 to 80. As you move up the scale the difficulty increases.
How to Increase the DA of a Website?
1. Get high-quality backlinks: Off-page SEO is a fundamental aspect of any SEO marketing strategy making backlinks indispensable. However, not all backlinks are created equal. You require quality backlinks to skyrocket your website SEO.
With high-quality backlinks on your website, search engines will classify your website as an authority in your niche, thus increasing your DA.
2. Create good content: If you are keen, you’ll notice that most websites ranking on the first page of SERPs have helpful content. Search engines won’t deliver mediocre results to their searchers. They want to provide the best to guarantee a good user experience.
Your content has to be good if you want a higher DA. Therefore, you should focus on creating content that’ll be helpful, engaging, and easy to read for your audience.
Such content will, in turn, generate more backlinks because people like to link to good content. Consequently, it’d increase your DA.
3. Do link audit and remove toxic links: Having backlinks on your website is not enough. You have to ensure that the links are not hurting your website. That’s why it is essential to do a link audit to identify and remove toxic links.
Did you know that the Moz tool may not identify when a website is penalized by Google? As such, it may reveal a high DA for a website that’s penalized, and you may believe their links are helpful.
On the contrary, backlinks from a penalized website may hurt yours. Therefore, a backlink audit is essential to help you avoid penalties and help improve your DA.
Here’s an article that’ll enlighten you on how to find and remove unwanted links from your website.
4. Fix on-page and technical issues: You must focus on on-page SEO and technical issues to increase your DA.
There are several things you must ensure are flawless. For example;
- Ensure you pay attention to H1 and H2 tags in all your content.
- Ensure that you SEO optimize your images, videos, and other content.
- Avoid keyword stuffing; make sure your keyword optimization is natural.
- Register your website on Google search console and Bing webmaster tools.
- Ensure you help search engines understand your website better by adding schema markup.
- Ensure that you define the breadcrumb menu on all the website’s pages.
- To ensure that Google and other search engine spiders can explore your website without issues, check your robots.txt settings and run Fetch as Google.
- Consider migrating to HTTPS if you haven’t already.
- Addressing some of these on-page and technical SEO issues may be overwhelming. If that’s the case, you could seek the help of an SEO expert.
The bottom line is that your DA will increase once you address all on-page and technical SEO issues.
5. Create internal links: Another way to increase your DA is by focusing on your internal link structure. Internal links direct users to other helpful content on your website, which guarantees a better user experience.
Also, it will help search bots to easily crawl your website and index your pages. When you link to other pages on your website, it’d pass the link juice, and this will help increase the DA of your website.
6. Website must be mobile friendly: Did you know that not having a mobile-friendly version of your website will negatively impact your DA score? It is safe to say that gone are the days when having a mobile-friendly website was optional; it is now mandatory.
Also, mobile-friendliness is a Google ranking factor because most searches (60%) are done on mobile and the rest on the desktop. Google is working on a mobile-first index, and websites that are not mobile-friendly won’t be included.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, ensure you rectify this ASAP.
7. Check the site’s page speed: Google’s algorithms pay attention to site speed for rankings on search engines. A website that loads faster has an advantage over one that loads slowly.
Interestingly, site speed is not solely essential for search engines but for humans as well. Searchers will not wait a long time for your website to load, they’ll switch to the next available website. Consequently, you lose leads and sales.
Ensure that your website loads fast and your DA will increase.
How Do You Check a Site’s Authority?
Several tools can be used to determine a website’s Domain Authority. Here are a few examples:
Moz Domain Analysis Tool: You can verify the Domain Authority of any website using the free Moz Domain Analysis Tool. Simply enter the URL of the website you want to look up, and the tool will display other helpful information along with its D A score.
MozBar: When you visit a website, the MozBar browser toolbar for Chrome displays the site’s DA & PA rating. You can download this tool bar from this page.
Ahrefs: The free SEO tool made by Ahrefs displays the “authority” of your website as determined by Ahrefs (i.e., Domain Rating).
How Is Domain Authority Calculated?
A website’s domain age, connecting root domains, the total number of links, backlink quality, outbound link ratio, MozRank, and MozTrust are all taken into account when calculating the domain authority score.
The score is on a scale of 0 to 100. The ranking potential of the website improves with a higher score.
How Does Google Rank Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is not a ranking criterion for Google. It is a Moz indicator that forecasts how well a website will perform on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Google ranks websites based on numerous criteria, including content quality, relevancy, user experience, and more, using its algorithm.
How Hard Is It to Increase the Authority of Website?
Increasing Domain Authority is not an easy task, and it can take time and effort to see results. The difficulty of increasing DA depends on various factors, including the current state of your website, the competitiveness of your industry or niche, and the quality and quantity of your website’s backlinks.
How Many Backlinks Do I Need for a High Authority?
The precise amount of backlinks required to rank a web page relies on the domain authority of your website and the PageRank of the outgoing links.
For a website to have a competitive domain authority for SEO, there should be 40 to 50 backlinks pointing to the homepage on average.
Also Read: How Many Backlinks Do I Need to Rank Page One on Google
How Do You Know if a Domain Authority Is Faked?
There are several methods for determining whether a domain authority is bogus.
Examining the anchor text and backlinks is one method. The domain is probably fraudulent if the anchor text contains too many foreign characters or if it is inappropriate for the domain.
All backlinks pointing to a single domain suggest that the domain is very dependent on that domain for value.
Another option is to evaluate the website’s backlink profile using tools like Ahrefs or Moz to look for any questionable patterns.
Conclusion
Even though domain authority is essential, it is not the only thing to focus on. Looking at the big picture entails building a website that will achieve solid rankings on all search engines.
Websites with low domain authority can equally rank higher in search results; therefore, domain authority doesn’t englobe everything involving a website. It is best to look at the bigger picture.
FAQs
What would bring my domain authority down?
There are several reasons your domain authority might have decreased. The lack of high-quality backlinks from a variety of sources, spammy-looking backlinks, or simply having an excessive number of low-quality links pointing to your domain are some of the causes.
How long does it take to increase domain authority?
It may take three to six months (or even longer) to increase your domain authority. Nobody can say with certainty how long it takes to raise a site’s domain authority. Depending on your efforts, it might take months, or it could take years.
How often is domain authority updated?
Based on statistics, most domain authority tools update the score every month. Therefore, your domain authority can be updated anytime between three and five weeks.
Why did my domain authority drop with the new Google algorithm update?
Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor and does not affect the SERPs. Therefore, it is unlikely that your domain authority dropped due to the new Google algorithm update.
Which should have higher domain authority or page authority?
Both are calculated using the same methodology. Building more links to your pages will have the effect of raising your domain authority, and raising your domain authority, in general, will increase the page authority of your pages.
