Finding Your Domain Authority

How do I find my domain authority? What does domain authority even mean? If you want to gain an edge against your competition, answering these questions will be beneficial. Understanding this SEO tool will help you understand your website’s health and clue you in to how you stack up against other websites on the search engine results page. This article will cover the answers to questions like how do I find my domain authority.  

What Does Domain Authority Mean?

Before we get into answering the question, “How do I find my domain authority,” you need to know what domain authority is. So, what does domain authority mean? At its base level, domain authority refers to a search engine ranking score developed by the software development company, Moz. to predict how likely a website is to rank in search engine results. It is important to note that it is not a factor in Google’s rankings. Instead, domain authority is meant to be used to compare your website relative to other websites. It is a way of measuring and predicting how your website will rank rather than an active ranking factor. 

how do I find my domain authority

How Is Domain Authority Calculated?

Websites are assigned a domain authority score from one to one hundred. The closer to one hundred, the more likely the site is to rank in search engine results. New businesses start at one and need to work to improve their domain authority and rank higher on the search engine results page. Domain authority is calculated using several factors. It uses machine learning, data from Moz’s Link Explorer File Index, root domains, inbound links, and many other factors to compare websites against actual search results to assign a number. For example, a site with a lot of quality inbound links will receive a higher domain score than one that lacks quality inbound links. 

It is important to know that as the data available about your website and other websites change, your score will also change. On one hand, this is great because it means that you can improve a lackluster domain authority. On the other hand, it also means that your domain authority can decrease through no fault of your own. If an already globally popular site like Amazon or Facebook sees an improvement that causes its Domain authority to increase, it can push down the rankings of other sites such as your own. You will want to check it often to keep track of where your website stands in the ever-evolving internet landscape.

Another difficulty you might encounter when trying to improve your domain authority depends on how high your first score is. It is much easier to improve a lower score than it is to improve an already high score. If you start at ten, jumping to twenty will take a lot less effort than it would take to earn the same ten points if you start at seventy. If you already have a great score but want to get it even higher, you need to be willing to put in a lot of effort that might not give you the returns you would like. 

What Does Domain Authority Mean For You?

Once you find your domain authority, you need to know what to do with it. Domain authority should not be used on its own to determine the success of your business, but it is an indication of trustworthiness and authority online. Domain authority is a comparative metric that is a helpful way of seeing where you stand in comparison to other websites. What constitutes a good score will vary from industry to industry. Getting the highest score possible would be nice, but the effort and time you need to put in might not be worth it in the end. Instead of focusing on getting the highest domain authority to score possible, you should focus on getting a score that is higher than your direct competitors. If you want to increase your domain authority, there are many ways to do so.

improve domain authority

Add Quality Links to Your Website

As stated earlier, the number of links from authoritative websites is one piece of information that the algorithm draws from to determine your domain authority. Remember, the quality of your links matters just as much if not more than the number. Use reputable and relevant sources.

Create Unique and Engaging Content

Metrics like an excellent bounce rate and organic traffic rates will improve your domain authority. If your content can draw people to your website and keep them there for a good amount of time, you will see your domain authority increase.

Check Out Your Competition

What are your competitors doing that you are not? Vice versa, what are you doing that they are not? You can learn from your competitors to increase your own domain authority; just be sure to keep content unique.

Update Old Content

Poor-performing content can be transformed into engaging new content. The more pages with high authority scores, the more likely you are to increase your domain authority.

domain authority checker

Domain Authority Checker

So now that you have the answer to the question, “what does domain authority mean” and have some ways to improve your domain authority, you are probably once again asking, “How do I find my domain authority?” After all, you need to know where you are starting to decide on where you want can go. A great way to find your domain authority is by using a domain authority checker. You can find an array of great domain authority checkers just by googling it. Try out as many as you like to decide which checker will work best to help you achieve your goals. Below we have compiled a list of some of the best domain authority checkers so you no longer need to ask, “How do I find my Domain Authority?”

Moz

The simplest answer to the question, “How do I find my domain authority,” is to use the tool provided by the software development company that invented it. Moz offers its own free domain authority checker. It is called Link Explorer. All you need to do is type the URL of the website you want to see the domain authority of. While this tool is free, you do need to create a free account to access the data. In addition to returning your domain authority, it will also give you the number of external linking domains, inbound links, and a list of keywords that your website is ranking within the top fifty of on Google. You can and should use all of this information to improve your domain authority. Maybe you have fewer inbound links than others in your industry.  

Ahrefs

Another free domain authority checker that you can use while learning how do I find my domain authority, is Ahref’s website authority checker. Just like Moz’s checker, all you have to do is enter the URL of the website you want to learn the domain authority of. Unlike checker, Ahref’s website authority checker does not require you to create an account. Like Moz’s checker, this tool will also give you the number of linking websites and backlinks to help you formulate a search engine optimization plan that will increase your domain authority and help you rank higher on Google. 

what does domain authority mean

Website SEO Checker

Website SEO Checker is another free option to check your domain authority. Unlike the other options, Website SEO Checker can check multiple websites at a time. If you want to do this for ease of competition comparison, all you need to do is type each URL on its line. It will return the domain authority and several other statistics so that you can easily see how you stack up against your competition. 

Majestic

Like the prior two checkers, Majestic is easy to use. All you need to do is type the URL into the search bar and hit enter. Majestic will return your domain authority along with many other metrics including the amount and quality of all backlinks. Majestic has two indexes, fresh and historic. The fresh index is updated multiple times a day and the historic index will search billions of URLs as far back as five years. Features like the historic index are only available on the paid plans. Investing in these extra features could be worth it if you are serious about increasing your domain authority and have the money.

SiteChecker

SiteChecker has a bit of everything you need to check up on your website’s health. Like the other checkers, all you need to do is enter the website’s URL to return the domain authority. In addition, you can find contributing factors like backlink quality and an SEO monitor. SiteChecker has three pricing packages starting at $14 a month, but they offer a free trial to get you started. 

Check Your Domain Authority

The importance of domain authority is a hotly debated topic. Whether or not it is really important for your search engine rankings is unclear, but the use of it as a metric of where your website currently stands can be incredibly useful. Now that we have answered the question, “How do I find my domain authority,” you can use this as a tool to measure the cumulative success of your combined search engine optimization techniques and find what needs improving. 

FAQ:

  • What is domain authority?
  • How do I interpret my domain authority score?
  • What is a good domain authority score?
  • How to increase your domain authority?
  • How do I check my domain authority for free?

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