Domain authority (DA), otherwise known as website authority, is a metric used to predict how likely it is for a website to appear in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to its competitors.
Initially developed by Moz, domain authority uses a scoring metric between 1-100, with one being the lowest, and considered the least likely to rank in the SERPs.
The higher the score, the greater the likelihood of your content ranking against your competitors.
Google have previously confirmed that DA isn’t used as a ranking metric; however, a recent leak of classified Google documents contradicted this statement, confirming the use of a “site authority” parameter.
Now we know that Google’s crawl bots are looking at the domain authority of a website, how can we increase this score?
We’ve detailed a few tips below.
Optimise your content to increase the levels of organic traffic to your site
One of the easiest ways to improve the domain authority of your website is to increase the levels of organic traffic directed to your site from the search engine results page.
Content that is optimised for the right keywords, matches the intent of the searcher and, perhaps most importantly, is helpful to the user, will undoubtedly perform well on the search engine results page.
The higher the pages on your website rank on Google, the higher the number of organic clicks your website will receive. The greater the number of organic clicks, the more probable it is that your content satisfies Google’s quality guidelines.
Meeting these guidelines can help improve the DA of your site, as Google wouldn’t rank content that wasn’t relevant or valuable to the searcher.
Use free online keyword research tools, such as Google’s keyword planner, and find out what people are searching for. Do a manual search of these keywords on Google to make sure that your content matches the intent of the searcher, and overall, make sure that your content is written to help the user, not just to appease Google’s crawl bots.
Increase the number of high-quality backlinks pointing to your site
The backlink profile of your website can have a detrimental impact on the DA score of your site.
Backlinks are an integral part of SEO (search engine optimisation) as Google views these links as little votes of support from one website to another.
The linking site is showing Google’s crawl bots that the content on the page, or site, is valuable, and as such should be ranked accordingly.
Backlinks can pass ‘link juice’ to the receiving site, which describes equity passed from one site to the other. The more backlinks, the more ‘link juice’ and the higher the strength of the site.
Backlinks pointing to your site should be collected from high-quality and reputable sources. It’s much more powerful to achieve one backlink from a valuable source than it is to achieve 20 backlinks from low-quality sources.
We would recommend conducting a backlink analysis of your top performing SERP competitors, using a tool such as SEranking, to identify any relevant, high-quality sources that are worth reaching out to. If they’re linking to your competitors, then why aren’t they linking to you?
Improve the on-page SEO of your website
Although the on-page SEO of your website doesn’t have a direct impact on your domain authority, if done wrong, it can negatively affect rankings and levels of traffic, which will then subsequently affect the DA score of your site.
Improving the on-page SEO of your site includes reviewing the meta titles, meta descriptions, header tags, alt text and internal linking structure.
The meta title and description don’t just help the searcher identify whether your website answers their query from the search engine results page. They also help crawl bots understand the contents of the page, which can help with indexing, and ultimately, improve rankings.
An effective internal linking structure helps crawl bots access the pages of your website easily, which can help when resources are short. The more pages they can find, the more pages they can index, and the more pages they can rank on the results page.
The more pages shown in Google, the higher the levels of traffic to your website, and the bigger the impact on your DA score.
Need help improving the domain authority score of your website? Contact the expert team at Engage Web today.
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