Ah, domain authority. Yet another invisible yet incredibly important detail of your website. As if there aren’t enough of those already. Though you won’t ever see your domain authority score (unless you’ve got nerdy web extensions like we do), every single website has one, and increasing it is essential to the site’s growth and success.
Confused? That’s fair. It may sound like a gaming term, but we promise domain authority is relevant to anyone with a website. In this post, we’re going to break down what domain authority is, why it’s important, and how to boost it for the benefit of your business. Let’s get stuck in.
What is domain authority?
Domain authority (DA) is a numeric score created by a company called Moz that estimates how well a website will rank in search engine results pages, known as SERPs. The score range is 0-100; the higher the number, the more likely the site is to hit those top SERP spots.
DA is also very much about relevance. When predicting how well the site ranks, it will also take topic and industry into consideration. To simplify it, the DA is a guess of how well your website will do in its relevant niche on search engine results pages. You can probably see now why it’s so important to have a healthy domain authority if you want your website to compete in the SERPs.
Are domain authority and page authority the same thing?
No, DA and PA aren’t quite the same thing, but they both measure how well a website might do on result pages. While the DA measures the overall domain’s chance to rank, the PA measures the ranking likelihood of singular pages.
The DA reflects the overall backlink number and quality, the age of the domain, and the site’s general quality. The PA reflects a page’s quantity of inbound links and their quality, user engagement metrics, and the relevance of the content. Although DA is more commonly recognised, domain authority and page authority are equally as important as each other, depending on the circumstances.
Here’s what our head of digital, Emily, has to say on DA and PA:
“The answer to whether DA is more important than PA or not depends on the context. If you’re looking at the credibility and strength behind a domain name as a whole, then DA is the one you want to pay attention to. If you’re looking at an individual page and trying to identify how strong it is in terms of link juice being sent to it, then PA is your gal.”
Why should I care about domain authority?
A strong domain authority score means a much better chance of appearing when someone searches for your service or product using a search engine like Google. Want more conversions? Care about your DA.
It’s important to remember that sites that get a score of 90-100 are names like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google themselves. While it would be beyond amazing to reach scores like these, don’t worry about making it a goal: your score should be relative to your competition. If your main rival in the SERPs has an average score of about 10 – 20, then make that your goal! You don’t need to reach for 100.
By building a healthy and steadily increasing domain authority score, you can also track your site’s growth. It’s a key metric to pay attention to and one that we digital marketers take very seriously. We care a whole lot about your site’s DA and do all we can to grow that number. But how do we do it?
How to boost domain authority
Links, content, site structure, oh my! To increase domain authority, there are several areas digital marketers can look at.
Collect quality backlinks
In bold and underlined on our strategy checklists is acquiring high-quality backlinks from other authoritative sites.
What is a backlink? It’s a link on another website that takes users to your website. The higher the DA of the site linking to you, the better the backlink and the more you’ll benefit, as long as the site linking to you is relevant and the link is a follow link.
The last thing you want is for search engines to see your site as spam, so avoid buying backlinks from or putting guest posts with links onto irrelevant, low-quality websites, no matter how high the DA is. If the site is littered with inaccuracies, bad formatting, or blog posts ranging from hairdressing tips to the best commercial solar panels, dismiss it as backlink potential and move on.
Create relevant content
The best way to get linked to from authoritative sources is by producing content that people want to link to!
A popular dog website with high DA might link to your dog brushing tips blog on your pet grooming site. This signals to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant within your industry, boosting your site’s authority and DA. Nice.
This doesn’t just apply to blog posts. Any form of content, be it an article or YouTube video, that results in an authoritative site linking to yours is good, useful content. Keep your site’s content fresh, relevant and consistent, especially with the last few Google core updates surrounding helpful content.
Ditch bad links, improve internal links
As mentioned earlier, some backlinks are stinkers. If they come from spammy sites like content farms (websites created for the sole purpose of hosting thousands of irrelevant blog posts to attract ad revenue), search engines won’t be happy. They’ll decrease your DA and maybe even penalise you. Yikes.
Digital marketing execs like ours will audit your site regularly to weed out overly toxic links and remove them, pronto. Our aim is a healthy, balanced and good quality link profile for you.
Good internal links enhance the user experience, increase content relevance, help bots find the right pages and strengthen the site plan, which we explain below.
Optimise UX and site structure
UX, which stands for user experience, is crucial in building a healthy DA. You want both human visitors and search engine bots to be able to navigate easily across your entire site, so creating a well-structured journey for them is essential. Having an efficient website structure helps the bots to index your pages, and without indexing, your site won’t appear in results when people use search engines.
Indexing is when bots ‘crawl’ web pages and store and categorise all the information they find, ready to show on SERPs. If they can’t crawl the page, there’s zero chance of it showing up in a SERP, and both the PA and DA will be negatively affected.
Let us build your domain authority
Fancy skipping the stress of adding domain authority to your to-do list? Let us add it to ours instead.
When working with us, you’ll get a dedicated exec committed to growing your online presence. They use a wide range of methods and techniques to do this, ensuring you get the best bang for your buck. Quality link-building, creating strong content and improving your domain authority is just a fraction of what our dedicated team of specialists can do.
Sound good? Give us a call on 01603 859007 and ask about digital marketing, or shoot us a message on our live chat.
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