The current digital landscape is a saturated one and getting your fair share of, well, market share, can be tough. Simply having a website doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get web traffic. If your site is relatively new, you’ll first have to prove to search engines that your website is legit and provides something that users actually want. Enter: domain authority. This little number can give you an idea as to how highly search engines think of your website. If you’re not sure why you’re not showing up in search results, understanding your website’s domain authority can help.

What Is Domain Authority? (A Super Simple Explanation)

Domain authority (also referred to as DA) is a relatively new type of metric that was developed as a predictor of how well a site will perform in search results. It is a logarithmic score on a scale of 1 to 100 that is primarily determined by how many quality backlinks a website has. In a nutshell, backlinks are signals from other websites that trust and value your website enough to link to your content from their own page. In the scope of DA, a high number of backlinks is indicative of greater authority, and thus, your site will earn a higher DA score. The higher your score, the more likely your site is to perform well in search results. 

But keep in mind that domain authority is simply an estimate by third-party sites. This score doesn’t directly influence SERP rankings; it’s not something fed directly into Google or Bing or that they use to determine search engine results (Google has its entirely own kind of ranking system). While the backlinks that influence domain authority scoring can carry weight in actual search engine rankings, they (the backlinks) are only one small piece of a massive puzzle. There’s disagreement among digital marketers about how influential or how accurate a predictor it is. Regardless, for a business owner looking for some guidance in their self-run marketing strategy, domain authority can be a useful tool for gauging the authoritative standing of your website.

Brand new domains start out at the bottom with a domain authority of 1. Fortunately, your site’s domain authority isn’t set in stone. A DA score can go up (or down) depending on a number of factors, one of which is something that can’t be rushed: time. Aside from the uncontrollable, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to improve domain authority. Many of the best practices go hand-in-hand with creating the right conditions for earning high-quality backlinks. There is an entire sub-field of SEO that is devoted to building, maintaining, and earning backlinks called link-building 

What Is A Backlink?

Backlinks are simply any instance where another website has linked to yours. Doesn’t matter which page or what context, if a site that isn’t yours includes your website’s URL, it counts. These backlinks are used as a proxy measurement to estimate how trustworthy and relevant the internet will find a website to be. What do backlinks have to do with authority? Think of the internet as an ongoing popular contest and each backlink is a vote in your favor. The more “votes”, the higher your site’s DA will be, and the greater the likelihood search engines will view it favorably and include it in search results. 

Backlinks are simply any instance where another website has linked to yours. Doesn’t matter which page or what context, if a site that isn’t yours includes your website’s URL, it counts. These backlinks are used as a proxy measurement to estimate how trustworthy and relevant the internet will find a website to be. What do backlinks have to do with authority? Think of the internet as an ongoing popular contest and each backlink is a vote in your favor. The more “votes”, the higher your site’s DA will be, and the greater the likelihood search engines will view it favorably and include it in search results. 

What’s My Site’s Domain Authority & How Do I Find It?

Now that you know how useful a tool domain authority can be, you’re burning with curiosity to see how your website scores. Perhaps you want to take a peek at your competitor’s DA to see how your website measures up (everyone does it). Fortunately, checking your domain authority is easy and, best of all, free!

Moz and Ahrefs offer some great free online SEO tools. Here, business owners can get valuable insight on their online presence without needing to create an account or signing up for a free trial. If you find domain authority as fascinating as we do, you might be interested in the Moz Toolbar, which is an internet browser extension that offers a staggering amount of information completely for free (although you will need to create an account first). 

Making Sense Of Your Score

When using these tools to check domain authority, bear in mind that the scoring can vary between different sites and you might get different numbers. Domain authority is a metric that many digital marketers use, but doesn’t have a universal set of criteria. After all, these are all just estimates made by different sources as an attempt to demystify the super-secretive world of search engine algorithms. 

If your DA score is high or leaves something to be desired, this number alone is not a marker of success (or failure). Domain authority only takes a few factors into consideration and may not correlate with how well your site performs in search engine results, how many eyes your site gets, or your click-through rate. Although this score can be a very helpful guideline and benchmark, it is not a hard set metric and certainly not the sole one you should use to measure your site’s performance. 

That being said, you’re probably still curious as to how to improve your domain authority. Even if your DA score only bears a fraction of relevance to your actual search engine performance, it couldn’t hurt to enhance it, right? We agree. The strategies and practices that can increase this score naturally lend themselves to improving your website, content, and user experience.

How To Improve Domain Authority

Increasing domain authority is absolutely possible but it’s something that takes quite a bit of virtual elbow grease and a whole lot of patience. Let’s get this out of the way: It is not a fast process. Even the “shortcuts” can take months for results to show. However, business owners can get the ball rolling by actively trying to earn backlinks for their site through:

• The creation of unique, informative content (blogs, infographics, videos, etc.)
• Bolstering their external presence on reputable directories (i.e. Yelp, Google Maps, or specialty sites)
• Reaching out to other websites and suggesting that they link to your content (known as ‘pitching’)

The nature of acquiring backlinks can be a time-consuming endeavor and is why many businesses turn to SEO agencies for assistance. The creation of content can be a massive undertaking on its own (which we can help with), as is the outreach and maintenance part of link building.

Another reason to enlist expert, outsider help? Even if you manage to do all of these suggestions on your own (make the content, pitch it to other sites, get listed on directors, etc.), there’s no guarantee that these efforts will yield backlinks or that those backlinks would boost your DA. Some backlinks carry more weight than others (i.e. Earning a backlink from CNN.com versus an unknown domain that was just created yesterday) and some backlinks can even be harmful to the health of your site and need to be removed, a process known as disavowal. Linkbuilding is an entire world within SEO that requires a lot of time and dedication that a busy business owner simply doesn’t have.

SO HOW IN THE WORLD DO YOU IMPROVE DOMAIN AUTHORITY?

Ultimately, if you focus on having an optimized website with will-made content and a great user experience, domain authority should naturally improve on its own. Instead of “If you build it, they will come”, it’s more like “If you optimize it, they will backlink”. The practices that go into search engine optimization naturally lend themselves to improving domain authority as well as making search engines happy. These strategies and techniques extend far beyond writing blogs or having a pretty website. They include having a well-thought-out site structure, metadata, fast loading speed, a mobile-optimized experience, and so much more. If your website has a low domain authority and you’d like to fix that (and boost your search engine rankings as a result), give us a call today.