It is likely that on more than one occasion you have thought that the best SEO efforts on your business website are not enough to rank in the best positions on Google. And it is certainly very difficult to optimize each of the more than 200 factors that determine the organic positioning of a page.
From Google’s perspective, domain authority is like your website’s reputation, which in some way ensures that it provides high-quality content on your specific topic.
If the site offers good content, it will have a good domain authority and Google will improve its ranking. If you don’t offer it, you will have bad domain authority and will not rank it.
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What Is Domain Authority?
In this article, we are going to delve into precisely how domain authority affects your web positioning and how you can improve your domain authority score. But first, let’s see what domain authority is.
Developed by SEO software company, Moz, domain authority is a ranking score that predicts a website’s ability to rank on the results pages of search engines, such as Google.
Domain authority ranges from a score of 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better your website will rank.
How Domain Authority Is Calculated?
To calculate the domain authority of websites, Moz takes into account more than 40 factors, such as the domain and the total number of inbound links.
For example, websites with a large number of high-quality inbound links, such as Wikipedia or Google, have the highest domain authority, while new websites with little or no inbound links usually have low domain authority.
Moz’s domain authority scale is also logarithmic, meaning that when your domain authority is higher, it is more difficult to improve your score. That is, increasing from 70 to 80 is more challenging than increasing from 20 to 30.
Also, to top it off, domain authority can decrease when, for example, a high authority website, such as Facebook, receives a high influx of external links.
And since you cannot give an authority score higher than 100, these sites keep their score at 100 while the rest lower theirs. In other words, the domain authority of your website is relative to the domain authority of the highest authority website.
According to Moz, domain authority should be looked at as a comparative metric: that is, a “good” domain authority score depends on the domain authority of the sites you are competing with.
Considering this, the goal should not be to have the highest authority score possible, but rather to have a higher authority score than your competitors.
How to Influence the Domain Authority?
The best way to influence your domain authority metric is to improve your website’s SEO. In particular, there are three major aspects to consider.
The link profile
This refers to the set of external links that a website receives since they are considered as an indicator that the site is safe, reliable, and relevant to users.
Attractive content
One of the most relevant points for the Google algorithm is the participation of users on your website: total traffic, organic traffic, direct traffic through Chrome, browsing time, bounce rate, mentions, and the number of users who visit more than once a web page.
It follows that to drive engagement on your website and, in turn, domain authority, there is only one way to do it: attract and retain a loyal audience by creating high-quality content. This content will also attract external links, which will help you enhance the aspect that we saw in the previous point.
High-quality links
Getting links from websites and pages with high authority scores is crucial to increasing the authority of your domain.
To get them, try using the skyscraper method, an SEO practice where you should look for content that ranks well for the keywords you’d like to rank for.
If a competitor’s content comes first, then it will have a ton of links. Then create better content and use SEO tools to find all the sites that have linked to your competitor’s content. Finally, ask the most relevant sites to replace their link with yours.
In 2016, the Backlinko company used this method and asked 160 sites to link to one of its publications, obtaining 17 inbound links, which represents a success rate of 11%.
Even though 17 links don’t sound like much, several of those referring websites had high domain authority scores, so organic traffic to the post increased by 110% in just two weeks.
How to Measure the Domain Authority of a Website?
To measure the authority of your domain, you can use MozBar, a free Chrome extension. The tool can also measure the likelihood that your website will rank for certain searches and keywords.
As we have seen throughout this article, it is difficult to control or influence domain authority in the short term. But if we constantly monitor the link profile, create attractive content, and get high-quality links, the domain authority will gradually improve, increasing Google rankings and long-term organic traffic.
Finally, we want to share one last resource that will help you review your website link profile. For that, you have to go to Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, which is a free Google tool that has a “Link Report” section, in which you can see the websites that have links to yours, your most linked pages and other useful information.
Now you have everything you need to know to improve your domain authority.