What is Domain Authority

The Domain Authority (DA) of a website is a score between 0 and 100 that tries to predict how well a website will rank on search engines. The higher your Domain Authority is, the greater your chances of achieving higher rankings in search engine result pages (SERPS) and getting more organic traffic.

The Domain Authority metric was initially developed by Moz, but other companies have created similar metrics that rank domains based on several factors and give them a rating from 0 to 100.

The idea of ranking domains based on their authority emerged from PageRank, introduced by Larry Page (one of Google’s Founders). It was used as a way to measure the importance of web pages and websites.

Steps to Increase Domain Authority

Let's understand how you can increase your domain authority:

1. Get Links From High-Authority Websites

The most effective way to increase your domain authority is to get backlinks from websites with a higher domain authority score. For example, getting a link from Washington Post (DA:97), will positively impact your DA score.

DA is calculated by taking into account the number and type of backlinks pointing to your website. Websites with a strong link profile will have a higher DA score than websites with a not-so-good link profile.

2. Improve Your On-Page SEO

The next step in improving your domain authority is to work on your on-page SEO. On-page SEO has to do with optimizing your page and content.

The most important on-page SEO factors are:

• Optimizing your page titles and meta descriptions
• Make proper use of Headings (H1 and H2) within your content
• Review your URL structure and create SEO-optimized permalinks.
• SEO Optimizing your images, videos, and other media elements
• Using keywords naturally in your content (no keyword stuffing)
• Formatting your content in such a way as to have more chances of ranking in Google’s featured snippets.

A powerful SEO technique that can influence your domain authority, related to on-page SEO, is your internal link structure. With internal linking, you can help users and crawlers discover your content easily.

Ensure that all pages of your site have at least one internal link pointing to them and that all pages are reachable from the homepage in less than 3 clicks.

3. Fix Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO is related to low-level SEO tasks and usually, once you get your technical SEO correct from the beginning, you don’t have to deal with it again.

On the other hand, if the Technical SEO aspect of your website is not correct, then this can have a huge impact on your domain authority and rankings.

The critical SEO settings you need to check include:

• Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.
• Create and optimize your XML sitemap and submit it to Google.
• Check your robots.txt settings and use the URL inspection tool to ensure that Google and other search engine spiders can crawl your website without problems.
• Add structured data (schema) information to help search engines understand the context of your content.
• Make sure that you have a properly defined breadcrumb menu on all pages.
• Make proper use of hreflang (in case you have a multilingual website).
• Find and fix any broken links.
• Ensure that your website passes the core web vitals.

4. Optimize User Experience On Mobile

With the introduction of mobile-first indexing, Google considers the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking purposes. This means you need to give special attention to your Mobile SEO and user experience on mobile.

In practice, this means:

• Having the same content on the desktop and mobile versions of your website. Adopting a responsive website design is the best way to achieve this.
• Removing any popups or other elements that provide a bad user experience on mobile devices.
• Formatting your content and navigation to fit on mobile screens.Failure to adhere to mobile best practices will have a negative impact on your overall domain authority score and Google rankings.

5. Improve Your Site Speed

One of the known ‘signals’ of the Google ranking algorithm is page speed. Websites that load faster, have an additional advantage over slower websites.

Improving your page speed will not only improve your rankings and domain authority but it will make the user experience better and this translates to more sales, leads, and signups.

It’s not always easy to tackle the page speed issue. There are a lot of technical elements involved and if you are not a developer or someone with technical knowledge, it can be very difficult.

Nevertheless, if you cannot afford to hire a developer to increase the loading speed of your website, you can check the following:

• Remove unnecessary plugins
• Upgrade WordPress (and plugins) to their latest versions
• Contact your hosting provider and ask them to give you a report on your server’s performance. If necessary, upgrade to a more powerful server.
• Use a caching plugin (such as wp-rocket)
• Optimize the file size of images
• Use a streaming service (like YouTube) for videos
• Use a CDN (content delivery network) in case you have big CSS files and many images

6. Increase Your Social Signals

Although, officially, Google has often stated that social signals are not part of the Google Ranking algorithm, a clear correlation exists between pages that rank high on Google and social signals.

Pages that are popular on Google tend to have many likes, shares, and tweets.

To increase your domain authority what you need to do is:

• To work on your Facebook business page and try to increase your followers.
• Make sure you have an active social media presence on some of the social networks so that the content you share will get some traction (likes, tweets, etc).
• Ensure you have a social media button on your pages to make it easy for readers to share your content.
• Check that your content looks good when shared using the social sharing buttons.

7. Monitor Your Progress

As mentioned in the introduction of this post, increasing your domain authority is not something that can be done overnight.

It will take time for crawlers to read and evaluate your website after making any of the above changes, so you must monitor your DA score and rankings and be patient.

Working systematically to improve your Google rankings will also positively affect?your domain authority score.

How To Find Out Your Domain Authority Score?

To find your domain authority score, go to Moz domain analysis SEO tool, type in your domain, and look at the result. Besides Moz, you can also use these domain authority checker tools.

Avoid becoming overly fixated on your domain authority score. It's merely a numerical representation of your domain's strength relative to others.

A lower DA score doesn't necessarily imply poor performance on Google. Conversely, a high DA score indicates you're on the right track, but it doesn't assure improved rankings or traffic—it's more of a forecast than a guarantee.

Did you like this article or have any questions? Feel free to drop a message.

Subscribe to my Newsletter to read more articles on Digital Marketing & SEO.