What Domain Authority Is (and Isn’t), and How to Increase It

Some companies and brands use the Domain Authority (DA) to study and evaluate the results of their digital strategies.

But what does this metric really mean? Should we really strive to improve it? Will having high domain authority help us rank better on Google?

Domain authority can be a very useful metric for knowing the status of a website compared to similar competitors, but we have to emphasize that it is not a ranking factor for Google.

In this post, we’re going to define what domain authority is – and what isn’t – and what to consider when optimizing.

What is domain authority?

Defining what is domain authority and what is not is really important to steer your digital strategy in the right direction.

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric developed by Moz that predicts how likely it is that a domain will appear in the SERPs compared to its competitors:

It’s important to highlight that Google does not use a domain authority as a ranking factor to decide how websites are rated. So it’s not a metric that improves your ranking on the search engine results page (SERPs). However, domain authority is a good indicator to help you evaluate your website’s performance against competitors.

Nowadays this metric is not only used by Moz. Various SEO tools like SEMrush have developed their own authority metric – an algorithm that uses data from backlinks, referring domains or search traffic, among other things, to determine the authority score. While this is not an official ranking factor from Google, it is a useful metric to understand the state of your website compared to your competitors.

What is a good domain authority score?

Moz’s Domain Authority search engine ranking score ranges from 1 to 100, with the higher numbers indicating the likelihood of better results in the SERPs. To define this metric, the SEO tool takes into account both the quantity and the quality of the links a webpage receives.

If a page has backlinks from high authority pages – like Google, Wikipedia, government sites, reputable newspapers or magazines – it has a higher chance of scoring better.

Depending on the type of industry or the characteristics of the website, it is more likely – and useful – to pull some backlinks over others.

For example, a training center can look for links to national newspapers, universities, academic articles, or government pages. A local company website, on the other hand, will likely prefer to be linked from regional newspapers or industry magazines, as those backlinks are more valuable to the company’s target audience, even if they don’t have the highest domain authorities.

So determining a good domain authority is different for every company. Ultimately, it is important that you analyze your top competitors and draw tailor-made conclusions for your own website based on your ranking and the ranking of your competitors.

How can I check my domain authority?

You can check your website’s domain authority for free on Moz Link Explorer. All you have to do is enter the root URL of your domain (like HubSpot.com) and your website’s Domain Authority Score will automatically be displayed.

The digital tool also offers other features – such as the number of unique external linking domains (linking domains), the number of unique pages that link to a page (inbound links), and the total number of keywords this website ranks for under the top 50 positions on Google (ranking keywords), among other metrics.

Domain Authority vs. Page Authority

While the Domain Authority determines the likelihood of a all Placing web domain in the SERPs, Page Authority specifically focuses on the likelihood of ranking each of the website’s pages individually.

This allows you to determine the performance of individual pages – like blog posts or product pages – to analyze which ones may need fine-tuning to get a higher score.

The page authority indicator can help you prioritize and define the next actions that you should develop within your digital strategy based on the pages with the greatest potential for improvement.

How to build a domain authority

Now let’s put this into practice: How can you build a domain authority and rank better than your competitors?

How Google indicates that it’s not just about the total number of links to your website or the total number of domain links, it’s the quality of these links are the ones that are relevant to understanding what your website is about.

When setting up a domain authority, keep the following tips in mind:

• Quality before quantity. Prioritize relevant backlinks over thousands that don’t matter.
• Analyze your backlinks, and make sure all interesting pages with backlinks have a do-follow.
• Create quality content which makes it easier for you to get natural backlinks.
• Generate content focused on yours Core audiencethat can be attractive to them and go viral.
• Update your older content. Go through these pages with unindexed content or with a low page authority rating and add new information of interest to the user.
• Identify your competitors and compare yourself with them. Analyze things you do and don’t do that will help increase your website’s visibility.
• Study where your main thing is Competitors get the backlinks from. Can you get similar ones too?
• Spread your web content, in an original and unique way via other channels such as social media or newsletters.

Building your domain authority is a long-term strategy – it takes time and you won’t see immediate results. However, by following these procedures, you can increase your website’s visibility in the SERPs to increase traffic to your website.

Work on these measures to focus on increasing the quality and quantity of leads, not just your Domain Authority Score.