Believe it or not, this article is a good example of how to increase domain authority of your website. Creating new, insightful content that’s helpful for others in your industry is one of a variety of methods that should be employed to improve the authority of your website. Before we get into the details – what is domain authority, and why is it so important?
Domain authority (DA) is a website-wide metric developed by Moz that is used to predict how well a website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to its competitors. In effect, your website’s domain authority communicates the value your website provides to users and, by extension, the level of credibility and influence your business has within your industry based on how your web pages are able to collectively rank in SERPs against others.
Often, your level of domain authority can directly translate to the level of confidence potential prospects and clients can expect to have in you.
As such, it’s essential that you have your own marketing team or access to an outsourced one with content creation, web development, and visual design capabilities and the knowledge and ability to not only maintain your domain authority but improve it.
In this post, we’ll go over our recommendations and best practices for how to increase domain authority to improve your standing within your industry and increase awareness of your business among potential prospects.
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Improving Domain Authority – A Deeper Dive
What Impacts Domain Authority?
When it comes to domain authority, both the quantity and quality of your backlinks (links from another website to a page on your own site or a link to another page on your own website) matter. It could be possible for your business to attain a strong domain authority with only a few dozen backlinks if many of them come from highly credible, authoritative sources. Think of publications like scientific studies, government reports, or network news articles.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a website could possess thousands of backlinks and still have poor domain authority if many of them are of low quality – whether because they come from other low-DA sites, they’re out of date or broken, or they come from potential spam sites. Additionally, Google actively punishes websites that engage in black hat SEO tactics – including the purchase of spammy links. If a site has too many spammy sites linking back to them, their domain authority will suffer.
That said, the factors that impact your domain authority can fluctuate, and your DA score can fluctuate in response. For this reason, it’s always best to view domain authority as a comparative metric. We suggest looking through the lens of “Have the changes you’ve made moved you closer to your competition?” instead of “How much has my domain authority increased?”
Why Does Domain Authority Matter?
We should make clear that domain authority is not an official determining factor in how your website will rank on Google and other search engines. Additionally, a higher domain authority score doesn’t guarantee that your website’s rank will be improved.
We know this doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the importance of domain authority but we can tell you with certainty that improving it will lead to improvements in the visibility and opportunities for your business.
The biggest reason you and your team should care about domain authority and work to improve it is because it is considered an accurate indicator of your trustworthiness and standing amongst your competitors across your industry.
What Is Considered A High Domain Authority Score?
First, there are many different factors that influence a website’s domain authority, and that domain authority doesn’t paint the full picture of a brand’s potential. For example, if your company created a new website that just went live, your domain authority score will almost certainly be near zero. This doesn’t mean there are critical issues with your site, it just hasn’t existed long enough to accrue additional backlinks.
In addition to these unique situations, domain authority scores can also be impacted to varying degrees based on your industry and content type.
Generally, we break down domain authority scores into the following ranges:
0-10: Very Low. We typically only see this kind of DA score for websites that were recently built. If your website is well-established but still has this low of a score, it is seen as unreliable and likely has few, if any, high-authority backlinks.
11-25: Low. If your domain authority score is in this range, it means you are at least registered with Google, but you have little to no history of SEO performance. There is still much work to be done in terms of ranking for keywords and accumulating quality backlinks.
26-40: Average. A website with a domain authority score in this range has the beginnings of a well-established backlink profile, but it can clearly be improved upon both in quantity and quality.
41-60: Good. This score range indicates a high-authority site. It likely has a well-thought-out SEO strategy incorporated into it, and with a few more tweaks, it can easily become a source of authority and thought leadership within its industry.
61-80: Great. A website with a score in this range has a robust amount of high-quality backlinks and is typically able to rank for the most sought-after keywords within its specific industry. It contains highly trusted, relevant content complete with popular, commonly searched keywords.
81+: Exceptional. Scores in this range typically belong to large, globally-known brands or organizations like, You This is generally reserved for very large brands and websites in the world, such as Google, YouTube, or Wikipedia.
How Is Domain Authority Calculated?
Domain Authority is a metric generated and determined by Moz, so we go by their own explanation of how the domain authority of any given website is calculated:
“Domain authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and total number of links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the "ranking strength" of a website over time. Domain Authority is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs.”
Translation: Your domain’s authority score comes from Moz’s algorithmic assessment of the authority of root domains – the highest-level domain in a website’s hierarchy (typically the home page) – that link back to your website, as well as the total number of links. Together these are combined into a single, comparative score.
We stress that it’s a comparative score because Google does not look at domain authority – a website’s domain authority score is not considered a ranking factor. This means having a high authority score won’t necessarily ensure you will be at the top of the SERP for every keyword phrase you want to rank for, but it is still generally considered to be a relatively accurate predictor of how Google views your website.
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What Your Marketing Team Can Do to Improve Domain Authority
Before you task your marketing team with the express goal of improving your domain authority, you should understand that it takes a considerable amount of research, strategy, and content creation which requires significant time and energy – there’s no quick, overnight solution to increasing domain authority. It’s an ongoing, involved process.
Luckily, there are a variety of simple, proven methods you can employ to give your domain authority a boost. With a team of content marketing experts and a cohesive strategy, you can start to see results in as little as a month.
Content Marketing Recommendations
Content Optimization (and Reoptimization)
One of the surest ways for you to simultaneously improve your chances of getting your web pages to the top of SERPs and make improvements to your domain authority is through regularly updating your website with high-quality, SEO-optimized content that provides a clear value to your audience and addresses their biggest needs, concerns, or pain points.
This applies to both the creation of new SEO-optimized content and reoptimization of your existing on-page content that is becoming dated or is otherwise due for a refresh in order to rank more competitively.
New, optimized content should include…
- High-value or targeted, niche keywords found through SEO research
- Internal links to other relevant web pages
- External links to high-authority, high-ranking web pages
Existing, Reoptimized Content should include…
- Updated keywords to ensure those of highest relevance and value are being targeted
- Updated internal links if new, relevant web pages have been created
- More recent or relevant external links to high-authority, high-ranking web pages
- A near total revamp of copy (50% at minimum)
Topic Clusters & Pillar Pages
In addition to optimizing pieces of content like blogs, articles, white papers, etc. that are hosted on your website, you should also focus on how easily users can find the information they’re seeking when they visit your site. This comes down to optimizing the organization of all information and content assets on your website. The best way to do that is with topic clusters and pillar pages.
Together they create a logical content framework that can help users find information on a website more easily and improve SEO at the same time. Pillar pages typically take the form of high-level, long-form articles that give broad coverage on a general topic.
Topic clusters are more detailed. As the name implies, they’re a collection of related pages that host in-depth articles on subtopics that all relate and are linked back to the respective pillar page.
The final piece of the puzzle? Internal links. They’re what ties everything together, providing connections between related cluster and pillar content.
Things to Avoid
We want to offer a word of warning though as you begin your content optimization efforts. As we mentioned earlier, you should steer clear of black hat SEO tactics. They may appear like advantageous shortcuts, but they will assuredly have a negative impact on domain authority. Keyword stuffing is one of the most common forms of black hat SEO.
If you’re unfamiliar, keyword stuffing is the frowned-upon tactic of using keywords in an excessive, unnatural way in your content in order to game search engines into ranking your content higher in SERPs.
Google will recognize this for the manipulative practice that it is and penalize you – negatively impacting your ranking and your domain authority. We understand the initial impulse to use your target keyword as much as possible, but it’s just not worth it.
Learn more about how to conduct effective keyword research to optimize your content.
Backlinks: Quality and Quantity
Given how critical relevant, high-ranking backlinks are to the domain authority of your website, naturally one of the first steps in assessing and improving your site should be to conduct a backlink audit.
Once completed, you will have a far better understanding of the quantity, quality, and relevance of links pointing to your website – both internal and external. Everything you discover from the audit should directly inform your backlink strategy.
If you want Google to be able to crawl your website more efficiently, creating a strong, cohesive internal linking strategy is essential. Having a variety of relevant, internal links is a hallmark of a strong website and SEO strategy, so you need to ensure your marketing team has a deep understanding of how internal links work and how to use them in a relevant, strategic way.
Where internal links establish relationships between content and help search engines find it more easily, incorporating external links from high domain authority websites can elevate your pages (and your domain authority by extension) based on the credibility and brand authority of their source.
This is the basic premise behind link juice, the value that one page or website passes to another through a link. In other words, link juice refers to the authority or ranking power that a link can transfer from one page to another. For example, if a high-traffic website like The Home Depot links to a relatively unknown home improvement blog, the blog will gain significant link juice (authority) from The Home Depot.
This might give the impression that there’s little downside to link juice – this isn’t the case. For all of the reputable, authoritative websites that link to you, nonreputable, low-authority websites can link to you as well. Always be vigilant and mindful of who you are linking to and who is linking to you.In reality, you should be very mindful of who you
Web Development & Visual Design Recommendations
Conduct A Technical Site Audit
As you get started in assessing your domain authority score and formulating a strategy to improve it, we recommend that, while your content marketing team works on creating valuable, SEO-optimized content, your web development team should be conducting a technical website audit to reveal any issues your website has that negatively affect your domain authority.
Triage The Technical Issues Impacting Your Domain Authority The Most
Once you’ve crawled every last page of your website in a full, in-depth technical audit, the next step is to assess the issues the audit revealed. Luckily, as part of their site auditing capabilities, many SEO tools like Moz and Semrush break down these issues and errors into an easy-to-understand, color-coded hierarchy separated into three distinct groups:
- Critical Errors (High): Duplicate tags, Duplicate content, Duplicate meta descriptions, Internal link broken, Link couldn’t be crawled, Page returned a 4XX status code, etc.
- Warnings (Medium): Pages with a temporary redirect, Pages with low text-HTML ratio, Pages don’t have meta descriptions, Pages have too much text in title tags, External links are broken, etc.
- Notices (Low): Non-descriptive anchor text, Pages with only one incoming internal link, Pages with more than one H1 tag, etc.
Once these problems are revealed, your web development team can start getting to work on repairing broken links, removing bad links, addressing 404 errors, and other technical issues.
A technical site audit from your web development team can also reveal issues with page load speed for both desktop and mobile and help identify large, high-resolution images that take excessive time to load. Page speed and user accessibility issues can have a significant negative impact on domain authority – more on addressing them here.
As your web devs work to improve page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and tags and alt attributes for images, visual designers can simultaneously work to compress images to further improve both the speed and overall user experience of your website.
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Trust The Process: Increasing Domain Authority Takes Time
We already said it once but we’ll say it again – domain authority is best used as a comparative metric, not a strictly absolute one. Always look at your website’s authority score in relation to others in your industry.
As a general rule, a good domain authority score is higher than or comparable to similar sites or the sites of your competitors. We recommend using tools like Moz, Semrush, or Ahrefs so you can regularly check on your domain authority, rectify any new errors, and make changes and improvements to your website as needed.
Some other important things to remember about domain authority – Google is inherently structured to promote websites that exhibit a clear level of expertise and are highly trusted by other similar websites in the given industry. If your goal is to create useful, insightful high-quality content that comes from a place of expertise and authority, you naturally should begin to see your domain authority score slowly but surely increase as time goes on.
In addition, increasing domain authority takes pragmatism and patience. In our experience at EBQ, it typically takes at least a month (or more) to begin to see improvements to your website’s domain authority score. It could also take even longer – largely depending on your specific industry, its level of competitiveness, and how difficult it is to rank for the specific keywords you’re looking to employ in your content.
Need help with improving the domain authority of your website? Our full-service marketing team is here to assist you in increasing your authority to generate visibility and interest to feed your sales efforts. Contact us today to start work on improving your domain authority.
