What makes some highly reputed websites always rank top in search engines? Have you ever wondered how Wikipedia, for instance, is always ranking high? The simple number one reason is that they have a high domain authority compared to other sites. High-domain authority websites such as Forbes or Wikipedia have mastered the art of how to increase domain authority.
But high domain authority doesn’t only happen to big websites, smaller businesses too can learn how to increase their domain authority over time.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority or DA is a metric that indicates the reputation of a website ranking from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest. When your website has a high DA, then it means that you rank high on Google and your traffic base is rock solid. DA is developed by SEO tools and you can track any website’s domain authority by installing their extensions or through their site explorer feature.
DA shows you a quick picture of your site’s SEO health. For a website that’s just launched, there is no domain authority, but for big and older websites, the DA ranges anywhere between 1 and 100. The DA score is generated by an algorithm that assesses the strength of a site in regard to how it ranks. For example, a DA of 60 and above is likely to rank more competitively than a DA of say 40.
With that said, it’s important to note that DA ranking is just part of Google page rank and not the only aspect considered. It’s a key digital marketing KPI necessary for your website’s growth.
How to Assess Your Domain Authority
There are tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, and others, you can use to find your DA. If this is not something you need to do too often, use the free trials to find out. All you need to do is list down the websites that appear above and below you on the SERP page for a phrase or term you rank for. These should be the websites you compete with. Then use the above tools to check the sites’ DA.
Alternatively, you can just use Moz to check your DA among other KPIs when you use their SEO analysis tool which is all free.
How Is Domain Authority Calculated?
The scores of a DA are made up of several ranking factors that are all balled up to make a number between 0 and 100. Moz describes these ranking factors as being inclusive of the following:
- Amount of authoritative backlinks
- Amount of referring links
- Root domain
- Quality and credibility of links
- Structure and user experience of your site
It’s clear that links play quite a big role in your website’s DA. A wealth of content coupled with high authority link diversification makes for some of the ways how to increase domain authority in 2022.
It’s also important to know that DA scores are logarithmic. This means that a single factor alone will not necessarily increase domain authority. For instance, you can increase your organic traffic which will put your DA at 40 to 41, and improving on SEO alone might bring it to 45.
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Does the Formula for Calculating Domain Authority Change?
The formula does not change frequently. A single formula can stay unchanged for up to 5 years. SEO apps apply minor tweaks whenever necessary. For example, Moz says they considered “Robustness against changes in Google’s algorithm and in the underlying Mozscape link index” in their design principle when they created the Moz algorithm.
What’s A Good DA Score?
By now you understand that your DA score is a relative metric that shows you how you compare to your competitors. And this can be determined by several factors such as the fact that some of your competitors’ websites have been around for years while others have superior authority such as Forbes.
It’s also possible to find that in some niches, a DA of 30 might not be good enough while in others it might be quite high.
Therefore with all these in view, it would be objective to state that there is no standard “good” score that can be set as a benchmark. The competitiveness of your DA is going to be determined by the niche your brand is in.
With that said, you tend to get a high DA score when your site gets a high number of referrals.
For instance, if you have about 20 domains that refer back to your site, you can get a DA score of anything from 0-20, if you get over 4,000 referring domains, you can have a DA score of anything between 40-60 and if you get over 300,000 referring domains, your DA score will fall anywhere between 80-100.
This simply means that the more referring domains your site get, the higher your DA score. But any score higher than your competitors for the target element is a good DA score.
What Does This Mean for Bloggers?
When your blog gets high refers, it means it’s considered credible, and this translates into a high DA score. Think about Wikipedia. Therefore the higher your blog’s DA score, the more the search engines recognize it, and the more users and partners value it. This means greater opportunities for you.
Such opportunities include more guest posts from other bloggers that want to contribute to your content as they get a backlink. It can also include invitations to contribute to other high domain authority websites which in return will earn you a backlink. All these and others are ways how to increase the domain authority of your site.
Domain Authority vs. Page Authority
As you have seen that domain authority is concerned with your entire website. Page authority uses a similar metric but measures the ranking strength of each individual web page. Page authority is the real test of the specific pages because it has a direct impact on your search engine ranking as well as your DA.
The metric used to rank page authority is similar to the one that ranks domain authority. It’s a scale of 0 to 100. And the factors that they use to determine page authority include the following:
- How many external links are on each page?
- The quality of the sites linking to a specific page.
- The number of social signals on each page, i.e. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. links
- How many root domains are linked on each page?
- The number of sub-domains that are linking to each page.
- How many of the root domain links are using partial anchor text?
It’s also important to note that Google doesn’t rank your website. It only ranks your web pages.
Why Do Low Authority Pages Outrank Higher Authority Pages?
Because there are many other factors with varying elements that can make a low authority page outshine the high authority page. These low authority pages can have exceptional performance in other areas such as:
- Having links to the page that contains the key phrases in them.
- The content on the page is relevant to the key phrase and it answers more questions on the topic compared to other competing sites.
- It has a sign of great user engagement and shows that visitors stay longer among other factors.
So, if you’re looking to learn how to increase your page authority, then these are the factors to look into.
How to Increase Your Domain Authority Score?
Up to this point, you may be wondering “how to increase my domain authority”. Wonder no more, having a high DA is about ranking better than your competitors. This means having quality over quantity as far as links are concerned. It’s all about the relevance to your content that carries the day.
Here are steps on how to increase domain authority in 2022:
Create Link-Worthy Content
As much as content is king, it’ll only pay off if it can attract shares and backlinks. It’s therefore worth considering this when creating your content strategy. Because the more linkable your content is, the more you will attract quality backlinks as well as social shares which we have seen to be quite important.
Think of it this way. You have created amazing content and readers have found it very helpful therefore they will share it easily with other people. Such an approach will equally increase the chances of getting backlinks from high-authority sites. This will end up boosting your root domain and overall DA.
Examples of link-worthy content include:
- How to tutorials. Solve your readers’ problems or pain points by giving them step-by-step tutorials that are straightforward and easy to follow.
- Lists. People love quick stuff; list posts are easily sharable and straight to the point.
- Feature Experts. Having an expert from your industry is a great way to get high-authority links in your content.
- Long-form content. Lengthy high-quality content that offers value to readers is recognized by both Google and SEO tools. Therefore, avoid thin content and make yourself an authority with in-depth solution-focused content.
Rid Negative SEO
Inbound links are valuable for your site’s domain authority ranking. However bad links can create more harm than good. For instance, if your site gets links from harmful websites, it could truly sabotage your DA and could even cause you to get a penalty from Google.
Another source of negative SEO could come from being hosted by a cheap server that allows malicious attacks or has outdated plugins.
It’s vital that you help increase your domain authority by conducting due diligence on the health of your website by auditing your site regularly and tracking your Google Search Console data. Fix any vulnerability that you come across. Takedown all harmful backlinks and get rid of outdated plugins. Also, get hosted by a trusted server.
Optimize Your Site User Experience and Structure
One of the factors mentioned above for calculating DA was website structure and user experience. A good structure enables easier crawling by search engines to index your site on search results. You can use a sitemap to ease navigation on your website.
Another factor is to improve your internal link structure. This will help your DA in two ways, first, it will ensure a smooth user experience. Direct your links to informative pages within your website to keep your visitors on your site. This is great for reducing the bounce rate.
Internal links also allow search engines to crawl and index your pages. A good structure increases domain authority over time bypassing the value of one page to other web pages (link juice). Plus, it indicates the trustworthiness of that page and thus increases its domain authority.
Another very important factor is user experience. If you have not optimized your website for mobile use, what are you waiting for? Did you know that Google now prioritizes how well a website functions on mobile?
This is one of the best things you can do when planning how to increase domain authority. A good site must function fully and smoothly on mobile and that includes fast loading.
The final factor is to ensure the safety of your website. Use SSL certificates. It’s compulsory.
Use Older Domains
The domain age affects your domain authority score. Younger domains tend to have low scores.
Get High-Quality Backlinks from Reputable Authority Sites
Are you tired of hearing about backlinks? Well, in domain authority they’re a really important factor. Statistics have shown that more backlinks translate to more organic traffic on a page. Therefore quality backlinks are important.
Source: Ahrefs
One way you can get quality backlinks is to use HARO. You could also look at your competitors’ backlink sources and see how you can get a link from the same sites. And an even easier way to get quality backlinks is through guest posting.
For guest posting, you have to publish on a website that has a higher DA than yours in order to increase your domain authority. This site also has to be offering relevant content that’s within your niche, it has to be relevant and of high quality, without these two, it could lower your DA.
Link the Unlinked Mentions
Besides getting high-quality backlinks, you can also build links by tracking where your brand has been mentioned but without the link being included. What you need to do is to contact these people that mentioned you and ask them to add the link, especially if they are an authority publication. Often times they will be happy to.
Wondering how you can get all your mentions?
It’s pretty simple, use Google Alert, set up your blog or brand name (it’s an easy process), and then you will get alerts whenever you have been mentioned. You can then head to that page to see whether you have been linked, if not, contact them and get linked. And this will especially happen if your website is an authority in the niche.
A Consistent Content Strategy
This means several things. First of all, you need to keep updating your old content to keep it relevant to your readers. Google notices fresh content and this is a great way on how to increase domain authority. So, if you have content that’s several years old, go and update it with SEO optimization in mind.
Another way of staying consistent with your content strategy is by consistently posting new relevant long-form content. Ensure that this content is superior to that of your competitors. It includes correctly formatting it, citing it thoroughly, and ensuring it is error-free.
When you post such content a minimum of once a month you can rest assured that you will notice an increase in your domain authority. The important thing in your content strategy is to offer value to your readers. Without value, you won’t earn any links, ergo, no increase or improvement in your DA.
Become an Authority in Your Niche
Everyone likes to associate with experts or brands considered to have authority in their niches. If you build your blog to become an authority in your niche, you will organically get linked by other bloggers or high-domain authority websites in your industry.
Conclusion
How well your domain authority ranks will largely depend on how you build it. Does domain authority matter? The simple answer is yes. It’s a great indicator of your website’s health in terms of strength, reliability, and trustworthiness.
You can increase your domain authority over time by bolstering your high-quality and authority link strategies as listed above. Couple that with stellar content and you’ll be on your way to success. Domain authority will help raise your website’s rank in search engine results. In simple, a good DA will set you up for success.
