How to Increase Domain Authority (and why it is important to do so)

Did you know that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results? Given this astonishing fact, it’s obvious that the mere development of a website is not enough for you to get noticed. In order to establish yourself as a credible source of information, drive more traffic and improve conversion rates, you need to invest a great deal of effort into boosting your ranks in SERP and that is why we look at the reasons why Domain Authority is considered a critical factor when measuring a website performance.

Search engines use a plethora of factors to determine how well your website ranks. However, as Google’s ranking algorithm updates keep shaking the digital marketing landscape to its core, domain authority (DA) has become one of the most critical website performance metrics. Here is what you need to know in order to increase it.

How to increase domain Authority

What is Domain Authority?

Originally developed by Moz, domain authority has gained momentum as one of the most significant ranking factors, contributing to 20% of your website’s success. Ranging from 0 to 100, it represents an independent measurement of how well your website will rank in Google. The average domain authority ranges between 40 and 50, while any score over 50 is believed to be above average. Logically, well-established websites with dozens of quality backlinks are at the top of this scale, while small business websites that start from scratch have a significantly lower DA.

This shouldn’t worry you. Namely, Moz defines domain authority as a logarithmic scale, pointing out that “it’s significantly easier to grow your score from 20 to 30 than it is to grow from 70 to 80.” In other words, it’s simpler for websites with a low DA to improve their rankings, than for ones with a high DA.

What you need to know is that domain authority comprises more than 40 ranking signals, including link root domains, MozRank, MozTrust, the quality of content, social metrics and search engine friendliness. Being highly complex, it cannot be increased overnight. It requires you to invest a great deal of effort in improving every major aspect of your SEO strategy.

Boost your Off-Site SEO by Generating Quality Backlinks

A few years ago, Google’s Matt Cutts said that the days of link building are long gone. Still, statistics show that this SEO practice has remained one of the most vital ranking factors.

Ideally, as the number of quality links leading to your website is rising, your domain authority and rank in SERPs will grow as well. Obviously, this is possible only if you’re generating external links from high-authority websites. On the contrary, building dozens of poor backlinks won’t bring any value to your website and might heavily affect your rankings in Google.

One of the most important off-site techniques for earning links is guest posting. Here, your aim is to find credible blogs in your niche and share quality content pointing to your website. This way, you will manage to grow your brand’s authority, get referral traffic and, most importantly, establish yourself as an expert in your industry. Apart from guest posting, there are other white hat options you might consider when obtaining backlinks, such as social media shares, social bookmarking sites and giveaway promotions.

Create Link-Worthy Content

As we have already mentioned, generating quality backlinks heavily depends on your content strategy. However, apart from the abovementioned off-site techniques, you should also invest in on-site content marketing efforts. For instance, you should develop a company blog and make it an informative and fresh source of information. After all, if you don’t share valuable content on your website, there is no point in linking to it.

When creating quality content your readers cannot help sharing, you need to pay attention to several aspects:

  • Deliver content that adds value to your customers and answers all their questions.
  • Create informative and industry-specific content.
  • Share your content regularly.
  • Keep up with trends and deliver highly interactive content that gets your readers to actively participate, such as infographics, videos, quizzes, quotes and gifs.
How to increase domain authority and why it is important to do so.

Optimize your Internal Links

Put simply, internal links direct one landing page to another within the same domain. This way, you improve your website navigation, direct your visitors to the content they are interested in, reduce bounce rate and improve user experience. Most importantly, you will be able to create a solid hierarchy of content, making it easier for Google to crawl and index your pages.

Here are a few techniques you could use to boost your internal linking efforts:

  • Share your content regularly. Only this way will you be able to link to your older blog posts, make your current content more informative, as well as spread link juice and PA (Page Authority)  throughout your website.
  • Build deep links to the pages that are not easily accessible from your homepage.
  • Link to pages with a lower PA in order to pass link juice to them.
  • Come up with organic and relevant anchor text. Additionally, you should avoid spammy, generic and keyword-rich anchor text.
  • Optimize your content-link ratio. In order to avoid Google’s penalties, you need to respect the limit to the number of links appropriate for your pages.
  • Better Web Design. Making the menu categorized perfectly not only helps users to navigate easier but also helps Google Bot to understand your website.
  • Link to relevant content. You should link to a certain page only if there is a topical connection between the content.

Conduct a Backlink Audit to Remove Bad Links

With Google’s 2013 Penguin 2.0 update, many sites faced a sudden decline in their page rank. Unsurprisingly, the main reason for this was poor backlinks. So, the moral is that you should never wait for a Penguin update to kill your rankings in SERP. Instead, conduct regular backlink audits to avoid Google penalties on time and establish your website as authoritative.

Even though it requires a lot of repetitive work, removing bad external links will help you gain a competitive advantage. All you need to do is go through your link profile to identify any backlinks from poor websites and remove them. Pay special attention to links in foreign languages, links with dubious anchor text, as well as those that have no topical relevance to your niche. The same goes for your blog. If there are any poor or broken links featured in your content, you need to remove them immediately.

You can also read: 10 Effective ways of Building Backlinks on your Blog

Conclusions

Domain authority plays a fundamental role when it comes to your website ranking. It not only assesses the overall performance of your website in Google, it also enables you to identify the worth of websites you are linking to or contributing to.

Always keep in mind that, as a powerful comparative ranking measure, DA covers numerous metrics and thus cannot be increased instantly. Instead, you need to look at the big picture, improve your overall SEO strategy and be patient.

What techniques do you use to boost DA?

About the Author

Darleen Prangue is a Freelance Digital Marketing Strategy Consultant with a focus on SEO. I love writing tech related stuff while I drink my first coffee at 5 am.

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Author: John Mulindi

John writes on a variety of topics. He blogs on topics ranging from social media marketing (SMM), search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, business, personal finance tech, entrepreneurship to personal development. In free time he likes watching football, reading, listening to music and taking nature walks.

118 thoughts on “How to Increase Domain Authority (and why it is important to do so)”

  1. Great post and some very important tips here, love the back link audit…another task for me to check Thank you

  2. Nice article.
    These are some tips that will increase your site’s DA and PA
    1. Unique and quality articles with proper info.
    2. Better On page and Off page SEO techniques.
    3. Backlinks from trusted and quality sites.
    There are also some other tips, but these three are the main ones for me.

  3. Thanks for this! I’m struggling to keep up with all of the SEO stuff and have not even been able to dive into DA and backlinking yet, so this is helpful info I’ll definitely come back to.

    1. Hey John! I am sorry if this comment is posted twice. Actually, I submitted the comment and left the page before it loaded completely. So I don’t know if the 1st comment was posted.

      Well, thanks for this post. This post came just in time. Yesterday I got an email from Ahrefs site audit. My website has 5 broken links. My blog is not an old one (just 6 months), so 5 broken links are all it takes to break my blog.

      This post was a reminder for me to fix those links ASAP.

      And one more problem with me is that I don’t share my content enough. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been writing and writing without much focus on promotion.

      I need to up my marketing game.

      Again, thanks for the post and keep inspiring.

      Ali from Infoverses

      PS: there are two author names for this post. John and also Darleen. I’m confused as to who is the actual author.

  4. Thank you for this! DA is kind of frustrating. I was improving until the last big algorithm change and I went down again! Still plugging away trying to improve it!

    1. Hi, yeah the frequent change of DA algorithm is really frustrating..this site was really hit hard. We went down more than 6 points otherwise thanks for reading.

  5. This is a great post! I really like the tip about conducting backlink audits. I’m on that post now lol. I try to optimise my internal links by putting “Related” sections throughout the post but I’m really bad at getting backlinks. I hope I can start guest posting next year! Thanks for the tips!

    Taiwo xx
    https://alifestylenerd.wordpress.com/

  6. These are very helpful tips and a useful reminder of ways in which domain authority can be improved. I certainly am trying to learn various techniques to increase DA score as my website is quite new.

  7. Such a great and useful post! I’ve been trying to understand Domain Authority more and more as I see people talking about it lot. I mean I basically do all of these things but I haven’t checked my DA since I took my hiatus and started back…Thanks for the reminder 😀

    xx Lena | https://lenadeexo.com

  8. I have really struggled since Moz changed the way they rank people recently and have such a low DA now ? I’m going to try doing some of these tips x

  9. Never thought about conducting a back-link audit. I also need to work on optimizing my internal links. Thanks for sharing this information! Going to make some changes to my blog!

  10. This is such a great post and very informative too. Awesome idea and advise that increasing domain definitely can boost one website ranking. Thank you for sharing this to us.

  11. You are SO right. I never go past the second page after searching but that hardly ever even happens. I usually stop at the bottom of the first page and put in a new phrase in the search engine if I didn’t see it right away. Thanks for the tips!

  12. I definitely need to work on this. It can be tough to find the time to maximize my domain authority, but it’s good to keep in mind when publishing new posts (to link within the blog, etc).

  13. This is such a great post. When having a website there is always something new to learn. I have been recently trying to up my SEO and page authority ranking. It takes time and always doing something new and learning more every day. Thanks for sharing these tips.

  14. We have been in the Search Engine marketing industry for a while, but I always learn something new everyday. Thank you for putting a great explanation for DA. I was never sure how to explain DA to other people, but I have so much better picture now. Thank you.

  15. Thanks a lot .Nice step you discussed in this blog. these all are true factors for getting good domain authority.
    This content on improving page author and domain authority is informative and filled with great tips ✨
    I’m glad to see that most of the techniques you mentioned in your post are also been implemented on my site ? . Once again thanks for putting out such content.

  16. Great tips, ever since I learned about DA I’ve been more quick to fix broken links and making sure I keep linking to other pages on my own site. Just need to keep guest posting on other sites.

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