For any business looking to gain an edge in search engine optimization (SEO), domain authority is vital. Commonly referred to as DA, domain authority was developed by digital marketing titan Moz as an indicator of how your website performs against competitors. This article will cover all elements of DA, from why it’s important to how to check it for your website. We will also provide some extremely useful tips to make sure that your company is achieving its maximum DA!
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Why Does Domain Authority Matter?
Your website has much to gain from prioritizing SEO. Whether you run an ecommerce business or nonprofit organization, SEO will help you reach your prospective clients more than ever. It can be really hard to figure out how your company ranks on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Luckily, the people at Moz digital marketing have simplified this process with domain authority.
DA tells you, on a scale from 0 to 100, how likely your company is to appear at the top of the SERP. They take multiple factors into account, like root domains and number of total links. Then, they compile all that information and give you a score on their scale. Websites like Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Netflix have DA scores in the mid 90s, which is exceptionally good.
How to Check Domain Authority
If you want to check your website’s domain authority, it’s very easy. Since Moz invented the whole concept of DA, it makes sense that you can easily find yours by visiting their website. All you need to do is plug in your domain to their link explorer, and they take care of the rest. You’ll see your DA, as well as other important data like your website’s backlink profile, immediately.
While Moz is the clear frontrunner for all things DA, their services come as part of a paid subscription service. However, if your business is unable to pay for Moz’s services, don’t worry! Multiple websites, including Ahrefs have their own tools that help you to measure how often your website appears towards the top of the search engine results page. Ahrefs calls their program “Domain Rating” or DR, though it essentially fulfills the same function.
How to Improve Your Domain Authority
Now that we have a basic understanding of domain authority, why it’s important, and how to check it, we now must focus on improving it. Remember, SEO is constantly changing. The website with the highest ranking on any SERP won’t hold that spot forever. If your company dedicates time to improving DA, chances are you’ll begin to see your company on the first page of many search engine results. Here are some tips and tricks to improve domain authority.
Utilize SEO Best Practices
The most simple thing you can do to improve domain authority is improve your SEO. At the end of the day, SEO and DA achieve the same result: getting you to the top of the SERP. Therefore, it makes sense that one would naturally improve the other. While DA is newer and very specific to Moz, there are tons of ways to improve your SEO by simply making sure you follow best practices.
First and foremost, make sure you have tons of content ready to go at all times. Content is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site as it offers tons of extra resources to potential clients. Next, make your website mobile friendly. Difficulty accessing your website on a mobile device will undoubtedly drive prospective clients away and cost you valuable traffic. Finally, make sure your website operates as quickly as possible. Having too many photos, external links, or other features can bog down your website and make it run slowly. A quick, efficient website is sure to result in a great customer experience!
Check Page Authority
Domain authority isn’t the only useful tool offered by Moz. If you want to know how well a specific page performs in terms of SEO, look no further than page authority. Page authority is the same process for DA just applied to a single web page. This can give you some really valuable insight as to which pages perform best on search engines.
Let’s say you do digital marketing for a non-profit organization. You log onto Moz to find that while your DA is low, the page on which you describe your mission has high page authority. With this information in mind, you can strengthen the other pages on your website. One way would be to include internal links on your mission page to drive traffic, or include more keywords in other pages. Either way, page authority gives you valuable, broken-down insight into which pages perform the best in your domain.
Remove Bad or Broken Links
Building off the last tip, pages with bad authority ratings can have a detrimental effect on your website’s domain authority. If you’re linking to a website with incorrect information or spam, those pages are very likely to rank poorly. This will bring down your overall score, as DA takes page authority into consideration.
If you want to avoid losing out to traffic due to bad or broken links, the simplest solution is to constantly monitor the links, both internal and external, used on your website. If you see that one link has very poor page authority, removing it can improve your score. Aside from your score, bad links can deter customers from using your site. Even as technology becomes more widely used and monitored, people are still concerned about malware and spam. By closely monitoring those links, you’ll catch any issues right away and make sure your score isn’t damaged.
Promote Your Business on Social Media
Social media remains one of the most important tools to anyone engaging in digital marketing. According to a study from Hubspot, over 70% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product based on social media referrals. If your website doesn’t have a presence on social media, then you could be losing out on reaching consumers. This doesn’t have to be some large-scale advertising campaign either: even posts from a business’ own social media page are great for outreach.
One of the best features of social media is the fact that you can promote so many different types of content. On Twitter and Facebook, you can write messages and include brief photos or videos about your products. If you prefer a more visual approach, websites like Instagram and Tumblr ensure your photo or video is the centerpiece of the content. Even better, nearly every single social media page has high domain authority thanks to the popularity and backing. By including that content in your website, your DA has a chance to improve!
Consult Other Sources
Given that domain authority encompasses so many values and metrics, people tend to focus very heavily on it. However, if you neglect other metrics in favor of DA, you might start to see them suffer. While it might seem like a lot to monitor DA as well as everything else, especially for a smaller business, it’s not as strenuous as it sounds. This is because all these systems overlap more than you might think!
Let’s take, for example, Google Analytics. Backed by the world’s most powerful search engine, Google Analytics consists of tons of great tools. One of the most valuable ones is their keyword analysis: this can give you some really great insight on which keywords related to your business perform the best. By including those keywords, you’ll see an improvement in your SEO, and therefore your DA should improve.
Don’t Fake It
Every brand that engages in SEO learns a valuable lesson: don’t try to cheat the system. Spending money for reviews, flooding your site with links, and spamming social media with content may seem like a good idea, but it’s not. As we saw before, bad links can damage your website’s reputation and authority. Besides, no one likes being spammed. Doing too much can hurt your website more than help it.
Search engines, as well as Moz, value quality over quantity. Even if your website only includes 10 links, but each one is carefully thought out and valued, you’ll see improvement in your domain authority. Conversely, people may try to charge you to increase your score. Some will say that for just $10, they’ll raise your score 10 points. They’re lying. DA is too complex and consists of too many factors for anyone to raise or lower it by exact numbers. At the end of the day, authenticity wins. Improve your SEO by utilizing best practices, and you’ll see improvement in your DA.
Time to Build Your Domain Authority
Hopefully this article has given you better insight into the intricacies of domain authority. Remember, the best way to build DA is by prioritizing SEO. If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, contact SEO Design Chicago today! With years of experience in SEO, our highly qualified experts can help you to improve your website and drive your DA to new heights!
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