If you are playing in the world of digital marketing or SEO, you are always in the race of getting more traffic to your website. You might have read or heard somewhere over and over again that increasing traffic on your website depends on the DA – Domain Authority. It’s the only solution to gain users to your website and generate more traffic. But what’s Domain Authority? Is it really important? And, if it’s, then what are the steps to increase the domain authority of your website?
Actually, domain authority is a number or metric that shows the authority of your website. The higher your DA is, the more chances of ranking your website on the top pages of search engines and hence getting more organic traffic. According to Moz, Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that determines how well a website will rank on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The score of domain authority ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
In short, the higher your website’s DA is, the higher you will rank on Search Engines – Google.
Domain Authority
Before indulging in the whole topic of domain authority, let’s share some facts and figures about DA. This insight will help you better understand exactly how you can improve your DA. Domain authority depends on various factors. The first and primary factor is, how many backward links are pointing to your website and how authoritative those websites are. It’s not an easy task to gain a 100 DA for your website. And even if you cannot reach that number, then it’s ok, there is no need to disappoint it. Because sites like Facebook and Google have it. DA is not easy to influence directly. You simply cannot change your DA score like you can change your title or meta descriptions.
Why is Domain Authority Important and How It is Calculated?
Domain authority is an easy way to understand how Google ranks websites. But let me tell you, Google’s ranking algorithms are a mystery. It will not be easily understood. Hence, we really have no idea how they decide which websites will rank based on which keywords. Definitely, Google shares best practices and their ranking factors regarding this ranking, but never reveals exactly how each website is ranked.
According to Moz, Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that determines how well a website will rank on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The score of domain authority ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
In short, the higher your website’s DA is, the higher you will rank on Search Engines – Google. Domain authority is the final representation of the search results landscape and a key that lets you understand why certain websites rank higher than others. Hence, higher DA ranking websites are well-versed and perform better than lower DA ranking sites. As a matter of fact, there’s a direct correlation between high DA scores and higher rankings.
Now, if it’s asked how the DA of a website is calculated. Then, let’s tell you DA is generally dependent on the number of linking websites. But quality is even more important. Links from high DA ranking websites themselves pass much authority to sites they link to. High DA websites have more incoming links, and they pass exponentially more authority when they link to other websites.
- Let’s bifurcate the websites based on DA.
- Popular daily blogs have more than 80 DA
- Major media websites have more than 90 DA
- Only a handful of websites have DA of 100 (Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Google)
Definitely, Domain Authority is not only about search ranking factors. Websites with lower authority often outrank sites with higher authority. The reason behind this is the ranking page may be more detailed, more focused on the search phrase. To rank well in the search engines, web pages need relevance in terms of authority.
How to Increase Domain Authority?
When you purchase a domain and register it, it takes time to build up authority. There are many factors that need to be considered such as proper on-page SEO, making sure your website content is pure and high quality, keeping your site mobile-friendly, and obviously, site loading speed. However, the biggest factor to increase your DA is your link building. In fact, you can basically consider DA rank as a measurement of how strong or weak your site is. Backlinks are considered as the primary factor in Google. While there are many other factors as well they are important in getting your site to rank and increase search traffic.
1) Work On Your Off-Page SEO
Your link profile is the most important and considered factor. If your website has a strong and clean profile, it’s likely to have a higher DA score than the websites with a not so good link profile.
Now, the question is what’s a strong link profile?
Strong Link Profile
A website is called a strong link profile, when:
It has incoming links from higher authority websites
All the incoming links are relevant and from related websites
it doesn’t have bad links (low-quality links)
The links are from various unique domains
How to Improve Your Link Profile?
Improving your link profile process is known as Off-Page SEO. It’s a process to acquire good links to your website that eventually improves your rankings. To improve your link profile stronger, all you have to do is to improve your Domain authority and for that, you need to:
a) Remove Bad Links From Your Profile
The first thing you have to do is to remove bad links from your website. You can find out these toxic links or band links with the help of various tools like Moz Explorer or Semrush. With the help of a developer, either you can remove the link or add the “nofollow tag” to devalue the link. If this doesn’t work for you, you can use the Google disavow tool to remove the links from your profile. If this does not work, you can use the Google disavow tool to remove the links from your profile.
b) Make Your Link Profile Stronger
To make your link profile stronger, you have to gain good relevant links from other related websites. Though, this is one of the most challenging parts of SEO. Link building is a vast topic on its own. However, beginners find it a bit tedious and difficult to understand.
Well, here are major two methods for link building:
b.1) Natural Link Building
If your website has great content, then it will attract links from other websites. This is known as ‘natural link building’. In short, if someone likes your content, and they find your website genuine and unique, they will read your articles. And like it. Then, they will link to it from one of their articles. To make this method successful, you must have a genuine and link-worthy content on your website. As we know, content is the king. So if your content is useful, easy to read and insightful, then other webmasters will be willing to reference it in their articles.
However, this process takes time to gain enough readership.
b.2) Blogger Outreach
The second way to build good links is blogger outreach. This means you have to reach out to other webmasters and let them know that you exist. In this way, you are increasing the chances of linking to your website within their articles.
2) On-Page SEO Optimization
The next step to improve your domain authority is to optimize your On-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO means optimizing your page and content.
Here are some factors that you should consider while optimizing On-Page SEO.
Optimized titles and Descriptions
Relevant and proper usage of Headings (H1 and H2 tags) within your content
Inject relevant keywords in your content (no keyword stuffing)
URL structure and SEO optimized permalinks
Use optimized images, videos and other media elements
Add internal links to your content page
It’s important to know that the quality of the content is the major factor that builds a good relationship with search engines for both on-page and off-page SEO. As per the Google official, you must have to keep your content fresh and up to date for better SERPs.
3) Keep Your Website Mobile-Friendly
It’s a fact that most of the traffic you get on your website is coming from mobile devices. So, it’s mandatory to keep your website mobile-friendly. If you have not optimized your website yet, then you are probably out of the race. It will not just hurt the search engine rankings, but you will also lose many visitors who get tired and not find your website friendly when they are operating from their mobile devices.
If you wish to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, you can check it here on the Google Developers page. It will analyze your website and let you know how mobile-friendly your website is. Google will show you a nice report with recommendations on how to make your website mobile-ready.
4) Improve Your Page Speed
Page speed is one of the major and known ‘signals’ of the Google ranking algorithm. The website which loads faster has an additional advantage over a slower website. Your page speed performance will not only improve your rankings and domain authority but it will give a user the best experience and this will eventually turn out into more sales, leads and revenue. You can also check your website’s loading speed with the PageSpeed tool by Google Developers.
You can not simply achieve a good page speed in no time. There are many technical factors that need to be considered while increasing your website page speed. Hence, if you are not a developer or not aware of technical knowledge, it can be very difficult for you. Nevertheless, here we are giving some of the factors you should check.
Remove unnecessary plugins
Keep your WordPress and plugins updated to their latest versions
Optimize the size of images
Use a streaming service like YouTube for videos
Get in touch with your hosting provider and ask them to give you a report on your server’s performance.
In case, if you have large CSS files and many images, use CDN – Content Delivery Network
Use a caching plugin
5) Promote Your Content via Social Media
Since social signals play a major role in a big ranking factor, you have to promote your content on social media in order to generate traffic. Otherwise, your content will remain limited to websites only. If you are promoting your content on your various social media platforms and creating a healthy relationship between your followers or customers, that will help you out creating a good engagement, resulting in generating more leads and traffic on your website. For this, you should include social media buttons on your webpages, so that would be convenient for users to share the content on their social media.
Wrapping Up
Don’t be obsessed with the number of domain authorities, if you are working to improve it. Well, it’s just a number that shows how your website is performing and where you stand as compared to other competitors. On the other hand, a low score of your DA doesn’t mean that your website is bad or will not perform well on Google. No matter how your DA is, there’s always room for improvement. So, always look at the bright side and the big picture, which is to build a website that over time will achieve good SERPs.
In short, to improve your website domain authority, your main focus should be on your quality content. Content marketing is the key that will open the door for your online business. In nutshell, it’s always content that matters more than anything when it comes to improving your domain authority. If you are following all of the given steps, then you will see a great impact on your DA over time. And if you are looking for a digital marketing company to help you out from this trouble, then you should waste no time thinking about it. Connect with an experienced Digital Marketing Company today and leverage Digital Marketing services today to improve the website domain authority.
