Do you want to rank your site at the very top of search engine results and receive tons of qualified organic traffic? If so, your first question should be ‘how do I increase my Domain Authority (DA)?’ 

The fact is the website’s Domain Authority directly influences your SERPs (search engine results pages). I’ll explain how it works in detail a bit later. Our key objective is to find out how to increase the Domain Authority of your website. 

Most likely you’re already familiar with the ‘Domain Authority’ concept and wonder how you can improve it. But even if you’re hearing this term for the first time, read on. In this article, I will shed light on all aspects of Domain Authority, including the definition, its importance, and ways to assess and improve it. 

In general, you’ll find the answers to these questions:

• What is Domain Authority and what is domain rating?
• How is it calculated and what are the factors influencing the DA?
• How do you increase Domain Authority? Proven steps and tools 

So, let’s dive into the topic right now!

What Are Domain Authority and Domain Rating?

Let’s start with the definition. What is Domain Authority? This term was developed by Moz, one of the largest SEO service providers worldwide, with the purpose of helping businesses determine what positions their site will take on SERPs. Thus, it’s a critical search engine ranking factor. 

Domain Authority indicator varies from 1 to 100. The higher the score is, the better chances for a site to rank are. You may use the Domain Authority metric to assess your overall SEO efforts and compare the strength of your website to the competitors’ resources.

Moz also distinguishes another term, Page Authority (PA) as a part of the ranking system. Page Authority means a value that search engines assign to a certain web page. Don’t get confused here! Whereas PA estimates the ranking potential of a single page, Domain Authority assesses the strength of an entire site. 

Meanwhile, Ahrefs, Moz’s larger competitor, came up with a similar concept but named it Domain Rating (DR). The DR is designed to determine the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile in terms of its size and quality. 

Backlinko conducted a global analysis to discover a correlation between Domain Rating and SERPs. Although Google does not openly utilize Domain Rating in their rankings, thanks to the report, it’s evident that DR dramatically influences a site’s ranking potential. That’s how the first page in Google averagely has 3.8x more backlinks than pages ranking from 2nd to 10th positions. The same correlation can be observed with Moz’s Domain Authority score.

Domain Authority and Domain Rating are key metrics that businesses use to analyze and assess the outcomes of their SEO strategies. Consider working on increasing these scores if you want to improve your site’s rankings. Remember that developing authority takes time, a lot of time. So don’t give up if you don’t see the growth immediately. 

How do you calculate Domain Authority and Domain Rating?

Check your Domain Authority on the Moz site and find out what your Domain Rating is on the Ahrefs site.

The Domain Authority score is based on multiple factors, including linking root domains and the number of total backlinks. If you use a Moz-designed algorithm, Domain Authority is rated on a scale from 1 to 100 (1 being the worst, 100 being the greatest). 

How do you define what a good DA score is? It’s easy: a bigger number corresponds to a site’s ability to rank better. Generally, we can set the following ranges:

• A DA of up to 40 is considered below average.
• A DA of 40 to 50 is considered average. 
• A DA of 50 to 60 is considered good.
• A DA of more than 60 is considered excellent.

But wait to get disappointed if your score is less than 60 or 40. Compare your Domain Authority to the score of your competitors to see if it outperforms them. For instance, your score is 50 while the majority of the competitors in your niche are in their forties. This is an obvious indicator that your DA of 56 is actually good. If it’s lower, it’s time to put in some more SEO efforts.

Also, remember that the Domain Authority is a logarithmic indicator, thus, it’s significantly easier to raise your Domain Authority from 10 to 20 rather than from 70 to 80. 

What are the ranking factors influencing the DA?

Ok, now it’s clear that the ultimate Domain Authority goal is reaching a score of 100. But what things influence DA growth? As you already know, the total number of links helps with building Domain Authority, but that’s not the only component. 

There are some more Domain Authority factors you should consider:

• The number of social signals from a page, including Google +1s, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn reactions, etc
• Brand search volume
• Domain age
• The quality, novelty, and uniqueness of the content on a page
• The number of high-quality diversified websites that link to a page with a partial match anchor text

Now that you know why Domain Authority is essential for your site’s ranking and what factors influence this score, it’s time to learn how you can use this knowledge to your advantage. 

Enough theory. Let’s get equipped with some practical tips on how you can increase your Domain Authority.

How to Increase Domain Authority? Proven Steps and Tools

Apply the following techniques if you are really determined to improve your Domain Authority score and rank higher on Google (and other search engines):

1. Check and improve site’s health via a technical site audit 

The first step to increase Domain Authority starts with a fundamental audit aimed at checking your “website’s SEO health.” You never can be sure that some technical errors are not hiding under the surface. To detect any hidden problems, you will have to conduct an in-depth technical site audit. 

This procedure involves an examination of different sites’ parameters and helps you optimize content architecture for search engines. The goal of the technical audit is to figure out what reduces your website’s performance and doesn’t correspond to Google’s standards. 

These are the most important components of a technical SEO audit that influence and help increase Domain Rating:

• Identifying crawl errors with a crawl report
• Checking HTTPS status codes
• Finding out the site load time
• Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly
• Checking XML sitemap status
• Checking for duplicate metadata
• Checking for site-wide duplicate content
• Checking meta description length
• Auditing for keyword cannibalization
• Searching for broken links 
• And much more…

Using special SEO tools for this check-up, such as Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, or any other, you’ll get an automatically formed report of what improvements and fixes you should do to help search engines process your website correctly. 

Site audit report in Ahrefs

2. Create valuable and linkable content 

Building Domain Authority is almost impossible without valuable and linkable content. For Google to increase your website’s worth, you will have to create viral content that is worth showing off, that people want to share and other websites want to link back to. 

Any great piece starts with the topic selection. How do you define the most trendy and popular topics that will engage your audience? Well, you can use some automated tools that will perform all the heavy work for you, giving you inspiration and fresh ideas.

‘Content Explorer’ by Ahrefs is one of these tools. With it, you can discover the most popular content on any topic across the web or on a particular website. By entering any term or phrase, you can get a high-level view of a topic’s popularity with the pages over time graph. Then, you may sort the results by social shares or backlinks. 

Content Explorer feature in Ahrefs

Another tool everyone knows about is Google Trends which indicates Google’s search queries popularity. You can check if a trend is increasing or going down anytime. To better understand search trends, you may also analyze demographic data, similar subjects, and related queries. 

Besides using specialized tools, you are also welcome to grab some inspiration from social media because the most exciting topics are spread there first. 

Content plays an essential role in creating viral material. I recommend that you focus on these formats:

• Blog posts
• Listicles
• Case studies
• Ebooks
• Infographics
• Videos
• How-to guides

Now comes one of the most important and complex content creation steps – writing an engaging article. Original, well-researched, and easy-to-understand content always stands out. To take your copywriting skills to the next level, implement these simple content marketing tips. 

No matter what type of content you create, it should have a certain structure, provide useful and valuable information, and, of course, be reinforced with a catchy call-to-action that best suits your intentions and goals. 

Also, make sure that your website has a unique tone of voice and style guide that stay consistent over a long period of time. It will help everyone easily recognize your site among all of the other content providers on the Internet.

3. Optimize pages for search engines

Learning how to optimize your website for search engines is critical to the success of boosting Domain Rating. Users will have a greater chance of finding your website and converting into customers if you optimize your web pages with the keywords relevant to their most common search queries. 

To define the keywords relevant to your business and niche, you can refer to any SEO tool such as Ahrefs, Moz, Ubersuggest, or Semrush. Use them to identify quick-win keywords with high search volume and acceptable difficulty matching the search intent. 

Consider why people may look for these specific terms and what they expect to discover on a page about them. Make sure your website gives answers to all their potential questions.

Combining the relevant keywords with high-quality text is the proven way to succeed in SEO. Efficient SEO writing is all about the smart collection of keywords and their use in content. And always remember that first off, you write for people, not for search robots.

4. Get backlinks to the content from reputable sites 

Studies prove over and over again that the more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic it receives from Google. However, 55.24% of pages still don’t have a single backlink which negatively affects their ability to boost Domain Authority. 

Now here is the question: how do you get backlinks to your site from other resources? The answer is developing a clever link-building strategy and leveraging the power of outreach marketing. One of our favorite link-building techniques is creating exclusive infographics and pitching them to the relevant media outlets. 

It’s a good practice to request other businesses to link to your relevant web pages directly. These email templates will make this process easy and streamlined.

The more trustworthy sites that link to your web pages, the higher your ranking will be. But how do you make sure the site you are going to get a backlink from is reputable? You’ll need to make an in-depth analysis of the site’s following parameters: 

• Content
• Admin
• Link Profile
• Authorship
• Reputation
• Technical state

Collected a list of the reliable sites? Well, it’s time to connect with their editors using the provided email templates and increase your backlink profile exponentially!

5. Check backlink profile to detect and remove spammy and toxic links 

The last part of building website authority is checking whether your resource suffers from any harmful backlinks or not. Negative SEO (also known as black hat SEO) can take various forms and generally consists of a mix of the following tactics:

• Getting spammy backlinks from low-quality sites
• Buying links in bulk
• Adding malware
• Modifying content
• Creating duplicate content

It’s not that hard now to detect and remove those harmful backlinks with specialized SEO tools and link indexes. The procedure for eliminating poor backlinks is straightforward:

• Find out what makes a link ‘toxic.’
• Use a backlink checker tool to find all the harmful links leading to your site.
• Request removal of the toxic links from your website by contacting the webmaster.
• Make a ‘disavow’ file and send it to Google to tell search robots to ignore those links.

The simplest way to obtain your backlink data is using Moz’s Link Explorer which provides a massive backlink database. With almost 30 trillion links in the index, you will be able to find the majority of the toxic backlinks. Getting rid of them is essential to boost your Domain Authority.

Conclusion

Building Domain Authority isn’t that difficult if you clearly understand how it all works. DA is a crucial marketing metric as it assists you in implementing a solid SEO strategy that moves your business forward. 

Keep in mind that while Domain Authority predicts your site’s ranking success, it does not ensure it. But do your best – concentrate on obtaining high-quality backlinks to your web pages that you want to rank from the relevant and authoritative websites. Your Domain Rating will surely improve a lot with time if you follow all of these advised steps.

If things still look complex or unclear to you, or you want to streamline the process of building links and increasing DA, connect with our experienced SEO team. Our professional link-building specialists will apply diversified white hat SEO techniques to help your website obtain as many high-quality links as possible, ultimately, driving your Domain Authority growth and bringing you more organic traffic!