What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is an important aspect for search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Before you try to optimize any content, you first have to understand what domain authority is and how it can improve your businesses exposure. In fact, the domain authority of a website is one of the most influential factors that contributes to its ranking by search engines. Once you are able to fully grasp this concept, you can highly optimize any website.
This article will cover everything you need to know about domain authority and what you can do to improve your overall score. Once you have mastered this understanding, you will be able to create optimized content that’s set up to rank from day one.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is a ranking score for search engines created by Moz. This ranking assesses the overall quality and content of a website, and predicts how well it will be able to position itself on search engine result pages (SERP).
The domain authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with the higher scores being the most authoritative. Moz has created a mozscape web index that factors in 40 components including Mozrank, link counts, and overall trust of your website to calculate the overall score. This score can be used to compare other competitors through the strength of the site.
To find out the domain authority of a website, you can use Mozbar and several other of their tools to get the calculated ranking. Once you find out a site’s ranking, you can then use that information to compare it to other sites, making it an excellent tool for comparison purposes. Whoever has the higher score is more likely to rank better when it comes to search results.
Another component that is also present through this tool is the page authority. The page authority ranks a specific page on the same factors as domain authority. Once again, this is a comparative tool that can be used when analyzing the power of other sites compared to yours. This tool also uses a one to 100 ranking, with 100 being the best.
What Is a Good Domain Authority Score?
Yes, the higher the score the better, however keep in mind that the actual number may vary depending on your competitors and your industry. Websites that have a large amount of reputable external links will be the key players that have the highest scores. On the other side of the spectrum, small businesses with fewer links will have smaller scores. Just remember all websites start with a domain authority score of a one, and have to work their way up in order to rank higher.
Don’t think of this tool as providing good or bad rankings. Instead, use it to compare other website’s link profile and overall content strategy. So to answer the question, “What is a good domain authority score?”, there is none. When used for comparison purposes, it’s best if your score is above your competitors.
How Do I Improve my Domain Authority?
While it is very difficult to improve your domain authority score over night, there are several techniques to follow that can help create a more rankable site. Keep in mind that there are 40 different factors that play into your ranking, so focusing on one improvement is not going to get you the results that you’re looking for.
The higher you get in ranking, the harder it will be to surpass your superiors. The best way to improve your overall score is by upping your SEO game and getting links to your page from other websites with a high domain authority. Even if you start implementing these practices today, do not expect to see results tomorrow. The Mozscape web index may not have registered your recent link building or it’s possible you acquired links that do not count for google ranking.
Even when developing an SEO strategy, just know that this can take months for your efforts to be rewarded. Although SEO is a very effective method that has proven to get results, you have to be patient and allow for google to increase your ranking. Make sure to optimize every page on your website effectively with SEO best practices, and if you haven’t, go back to older pages and do so.
As recently highlighted, getting links to your site is probably the easiest and fastest way you can increase your domain authority score. Now, when doing this, make sure these backlinks are coming from reputable and trustworthy sites that are of higher quality. If you try to skip corners and only get low-quality links or even try to buy your links, this will only hurt you more than it will help you. Take your time and really go for those higher-ranking websites if you want to see an improvement in your domain authority score.
Another easy factor that you can control is your personal internal linking strategy on your site. As you are writing new posts, make sure to link to other articles that you have already written or go back and add them in to the older ones. This will help connect old with new blog posts and keep all of your content relevant and relatable. Having similar blog posts from one another is also an easy way to build a content cluster, which helps your site become more authoritative regarding that topic.
While on the subject of blog posts, make sure you are posting high-quality content. Do not try to over produce blog posts only for the sole purpose of having new content every day on your site. Instead what you have to do is focus on the quality, even if that means only posting 3 to 4 times a week instead.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, domain authority is a critical metric that should be used when trying to increase your ranking in search engines. This tool is an excellent way to compare your site to other competitors or industry leaders. If you have never considered checking your domain authority, now’s the perfect opportunity to do so. If your score is lower than you expected or below your competitors, try following the tips above which will help you get to where you want to be.
