Discover what domain authority is, how to track your score, and increase your small business site’s domain authority. There are many ways to increase your website domain authority score, from social media marketing campaigns to optimizing your pages for mobile-friendly viewing.
Improving domain authority is an essential aspect of building your brand and optimizing your small business website.
Domain authority, or DA, is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz, a leader in the SEO industry. Based on a variety of algorithms, DA scores range from 1 to 100; the higher the score means there is a greater likelihood of your site ranking.
Where a good domain authority score would be closer to 100, a low authority domain score would be closer to 1. DA is a good indicator of the relevance of your website and the industry or subject matter people are searching for. Your brand awareness, or prestige of authors, quality of content on your website, and the competitive situation around your business, all factor into your DA. Since your DA score is based on numerous factors, it will often fluctuate.
While domain authority looks at the whole website, page authority focuses on specific pages. Page authority, or PA, is based on data from Moz’s web index and takes into account multiple factors, and uses an algorithm that correlates with rankings across SERPs that are then compared.
SERPs play a vital role in PA, though they do not directly impact your domain authority.
Creating a website and its content is a big task, and with the ever-changing marketplace, you don’t want your efforts to remain stagnant. Your domain authority score will help you understand where your business sits in the SERP results. It will give you an idea of how your website compares to your competitors and will allow you to make adjustments when your score is lower than you want it to be.
Your DA score gives you an insight into the landscape of your industry in the digital space. In addition, the higher your score, the more likely you are to rank in Google results. While it doesn’t directly impact your position on the search results page, to have a high authority score, you will have to have proper SEO strategies in place, which will give you a higher ranking.
A higher DA score means your business will be seen by people looking for the products or services your business offers.
Domain authority is scored on a scale of 1 to 100. Domain authority score between 40 and 50 is considered to be average, between 50 and 60 is considered good, and over 60 is considered excellent.
There are many factors that Moz looks at when evaluating your website’s domain authority score. This includes root domains or inbound links, as well as the quality of content on your site, social media activity, and proper SEO practices. All of these things are taken into account when your DA score is calculated through a machine learning model.
Some Google ranking factors that impact your domain authority score include:
Your domain authority score is updated every 3 to 4 weeks. As you take steps to increase this metric, it is important to have patience when checking your score.
You can find out domain authority scores by downloading a third-party extension to your web browser. There are many SEO tools available to help you find out what your website’s domain authority score is; these include:
Moz offers numerous tools to help you track your DA score. Their Link Explorer, MozBar, and Keyword Explorer will allow you to know your authority metric and offer ways to help you improve your score for your small business website.
MozBar is probably your best option. It’s free and will allow you to see your DA score as well as your competitors. With just a few clicks, the extension will be added to your browser.
You can use the Website “Authority” Checker that Ahrefs offers. They use a domain rating that runs on a scale of 0 to 100. This tool uses various factors when giving you your domain rating, including how many unique domains link to the target website and the authority of those linking domains.
SEMrush uses Authority Score to help you measure the impact of your website. Their Authority Score grades the overall quality of a website. The higher to score, the better chance your website has of ranking. They take the following factors into consideration: backlink data, referring domains, inbound and outbound links, backlinks, and total backlinks.
You can access this tool through their Backlink Analytics tool. This tool will allow you to analyze your domains ten times. After that, they require you to purchase a SEMRush subscription.
White, there are no surefire ways to increase your Domain Authority, there are some things you can do that will go towards increasing your DA score.
Technical SEO is an important part of any website. It refers to the technical requirements that search engines prefer when crawling search results. There are many technical factors that give you a better chance of ranking, like:
Learn more about technical SEO here.
Linkable content will allow you to increase your backlinking. Linkable content tends to be well-researched and often focuses on in-depth subject matters. The creators of this content tend to be seen as an authority on the subject matter and are industry leaders.
Linkable content also caters to a niche audience, so don’t be afraid to create content for a subset of your customers. It is also important that linkable content be timeless or evergreen, this will decrease the chances of someone linking to your content and finding a dead link.
Building your website authority takes time, but a good way to start your journey is to improve your internal infrastructure. When you publish new content on your website, search engines crawl that new piece of content. If you include links to previously published content, that content will be crawled as well. This will give your previous content a chance to be crawled when they were once inaccessible to search engines.
Internal linking will not only increase your DA score, but it will also help you develop a better content strategy. By using internal linking, you can organize your content into topic categories.
As mentioned above, it is important that you create original and high-quality content. When scoring your domain authority, search engine crawlers will count it as a point against you if you have duplicate content on your site.
Working and honing your content strategy will help you create high-quality content that your customers and target audience will actually read. Go for content that is at least 1000 words long and well researched and thought out topics. Also, make sure you include keywords that have high search intent.
With high-quality content comes high-quality linking. When you are deciding on what links to use in your content, make sure the content you are linking to also follows the guidelines that you are using on your own site. High-quality links include linking to other relevant and authoritative pages on your site, as well as high-quality pages outside your domain.
Links that direct your audience to outside your website, or external links, should come from websites that have a high DA score. You can check any website’s domain authority with the tool you decided to use.
You don’t want to use low-quality links or spammy links. These links possess a low authority score and are not trustworthy. Using low-quality links can decrease your domain score and increase your spam score, meaning Google will be less likely to trust and therefore provide your site to others. For example, linking to an article that was out of date, content that is spammy, or to a product that is sold out, will definitely lower all page and domain authority scores.
Due to the fact that external links have an effect on this domain authority metric, it is important that businesses create a link-building strategy, including a link profile. A link-building strategy and link profile will help you keep on top of the links associated with your business site.
In 2015, Google introduced their “mobile-first’ crawling preference to search rankings. This means that when Google crawls your site, it is looking at the mobile version of your website first. These are five key factors used by Google when crawling your mobile-friendly pages:
Sharing your website and its pages on social media platforms will do wonders for your domain authority score. This is because social media likes, comments, and sharing are all taken into account when scoring your DA.
Social platform signals are a big ranking factor and if you don’t create content that your followers can engage with, your content will be just sitting on your site all by itself. It is a good idea to include sharing buttons directly on your site, so your readers can share them with their followers. Social media marketing is an important part of any small business marketing strategy.
Just like you need the right tools to help you build your domain authority and increase your ranking strength, your business needs quality software to build its finances. QuickBooks Online offers a whole slew of features to help your business with its payment processing, expense tracking, and more! Try it for free today.
Watch this webinar as Michaela, an official LinkedIn Learning Instructor and LinkedIn Creator with over 200,000 followers worldwide breaks down everything that you need to know to create your mark and shine on LinkedIn. By the end of this webinar, you’ll walk away with a blueprint on how to get started and succeed on the LinkedIn platform!
Call Sales: 1-888-829-8589
