What is Domain Authority and Why Should You Care?

One of the elements that impacts your websites rankings in search engines is “domain authority”. This is a measure of how well respected your website is.

The other main factors are what we call ‘technical SEO’ (how well built your site is) and content (the topics you talk about them, and the way in which those articles are written).

Domain authority is affected by how many links you have coming in from other websites, and importantly, the quality of those sites. In other words, PR.

Google’s own measure of the quality of pages within your website is called PageRank, although the company stopped letting website owners see what PageRank their web pages had been assigned back in 2016.

PageRank, and domain authority generally, is passed through links. For example, important, high ranking sites linking to yours will increase your website’s domain authority more than links from lower quality, lower ranking sites.

Context is also important. Links from websites that are in your industry and web pages on similar topics are also likely to have a bigger impact than those that aren’t, all other factors being equal.

There are a few ways to take a look at how your website currently performs. One is to take a look at the Links Report in Google Search Console.Alternatively, you could use ahrefs Website Authority Checker https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker or Moz’s SEO Analysis Tool https://moz.com/domain-analysis

As for how to improve your domain authority, you need to give people a reason to link to you, and to encourage them to do so.This can include “online PR’ - getting news sites, industry websites and influencers to write about your business and include links back to your site, or creating slide decks or infographics and posting them on sites such as Slideshare or Pinterest

Quality links aren’t achieved in 5 minutes, they need investment in time and ideas, and you need dozens or hundreds to make a difference. Because of the effort involved, the general advice is to make a concerted, ongoing effort over months and years rather than hoping to strike search ranking gold in one big push.

The internet is already full of tips on how to improve your domain authority, simply Google "how to get inbound links".

What help with anything covered in this article email us on [email protected] and we can try and introduce you to the right person.