5 Ways to Boost Your Website’s Domain Authority

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2075

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Most website owners have the goal of getting to the #1 spot of the search engine results page. That number one slot can increase your click-through rates by as much as 200 percent! But even getting on the first page of search results can help your website. 

Google uses over 200 ranking factors to generate search engine results, and while domain authority (DA) is not one of them, it’s an important metric for any website owner. DA is a ranking metric that predicts how well a site will rank online. It’s an industry standard for SEO and predicting where a site ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs.) 

You’ll have higher traffic numbers and conversion rates if you have a high DA score because you’re doing SEO the right way. Remember, DA is a prediction of how Google would rank your site based on a variety of factors. 

Like anything else in the SEO world, DA is a long-term metric that takes time and effort to affect it. So, if you’re looking for ways to boost your DA and thereby increase your site traffic, conversions, email subscriptions, and more, keep reading. 

Understanding Domain Authority

Before we dive into boosting your DA score, you’ve got to understand what your DA score is and what elements affect it. 

DA was created by Moz, the SEO software company, and is calculated by evaluating multiple elements of your website, such as linking root domains and total number of inbound links. DA ranges from a score of 1 to 100, and the higher your score, the better your website will rank. 

Credit: Domain Authority – Moz

More simply, your DA shows your site’s relevance for your industry, market, or a specific topic. Your score can fluctuate based on the factors Moz uses to score your DA, meaning it can go up or down relative to the DA of the highest authority website. Not only that, but Moz designed DA to be logarithmic, which means that when your score is high, it’s hard to improve it. For example, it’s easy to go from 20 to 30, but significantly harder to go from 80-90.

What’s a Good Domain Authority Score?

Many factors go into calculating a DA score, but, the higher the score, the better your chances of getting highly ranked by Google. 

Large, well-known websites like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have high DA scores (between 95-100), while CustomerThink’s website is around 71 as of this writing. Smaller or newer websites will have a DA in the 10-20 range, mainly because they don’t have a lot of backlinks.

Just remember, DA helps you predict your website’s position in search engine results and is tied to the entire domain. You may have pages that rank higher than your overall domain, which is a separate topic (page domain versus domain authority.) 

Now that we’ve covered what domain authority is and why it’s important to your website let’s take a look at how you can increase your DA score.

5 Ways to Boost Your Website’s DA Score

Remember, increasing your DA score is a long-term SEO activity, so it’ll take some time for these to have an immediate effect. 

1. Conduct a Link Audit

Google likes domains with a lot of links to a lot of sites, especially if they’re from an authoritative external website. It’ll reward your site if you have lots of good ones and will penalize it if you have a lot of bad ones. So you’ll need to make sure your backlinks are plentiful and high-quality. 

That means you have to do a link audit. So, pull out an SEO tool like Ahrefs’ backlink checker or Ubersuggest and type in your domain. The tool will go through all your backlinks and give you a bunch of information about them, including DA scores. Take a look at your backlinks and focus on the ones from sites with a DA below 40. These are the ones you’ll want to dig deeper on. 

Look at the relevance of the site, its content quality, and how it links to your website. You can disavow any of these links with Google’s Disavow tool since they’re harming your site’s performance online. When you do this, Google ignores those backlinks when generating SERPs. While not a perfect solution, it’ll help your site. 

2. Plan for More High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for search engines. Ahrefs even showed that over 90% of websites aren’t getting organic traffic because they don’t have any backlinks. So, getting backlinks is essential for your website. Getting high-quality backlinks is vital if you want to have a successful website. 

To get more backlinks, use an analytics tool to find your top referring websites. Research similar ones to your top referrers and get backlinks to them through post comments, shares, roundup posts, or guest blogging on their site.

You can also look at your competitors and see where their backlinks come from. Then, plan on trying to get backlinks from those sites too. 

3. Create Link-Worthy Content Others Can Link To

When you create great content that others want to share, you increase your chances of getting backlinks from high-authority websites. Plus, it’ll increase your root domain score, which is a significant factor in calculating your DA (that’s the number of individual domains that link to your site.) 

You can create articles, guides, infographics, podcasts, mini webinars, presentations, and more. But if you want to boost your DA, you’ll need to look at the most popular pages on your website. This way, you can create similar content types and talk about related topics, ensuring it’ll get shared more online and earn you more backlinks.

4. Develop a User-Friendly Site Structure

One of the factors Moz uses to calculate your DA is your site structure. The simpler it is, the faster Google can index it and include it in SERPs. A sitemap is a sort of roadmap for your website, helping search engines index the most important pages quickly. 

The second part of your site structure that affects your DA is how easy it is for people to use. And since many people are accessing the Internet via their mobile devices, it makes sense to optimize your site for mobile. Check that it functions properly on mobile devices, that it loads quickly, and provides the same experience as a desktop user. 

5. Improve Your Internal Links

Internal links are a good SEO signal to search engines and an excellent way to boost your DA. Why? Because you keep people on your website for longer as they move from link to link and page to page. They also make it easier for search engines to index your site because they can see which pages are important to you. 

One thing to remember is that you don’t ultimately control your website’s domain authority directly. Your score is calculated from a variety of factors that you have to put into place and do well, so your DA increases steadily. Improving your DA should be a long-term strategy for your website. Use these five tips to lay a good foundation for your website, and you should see your DA score go up accordingly. 

Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.

7 COMMENTS

  1. One of the most basic ways of how to get backlinks is by creating top-notch content. Your goal should be to create a piece of content that other bloggers and industry experts can use and link back to your site.

    This may be a time-intensive strategy but if you can get it right, it’s worth the effort. There are different types of content you can produce. You can write how-to articles, create guides, list posts, and run quizzes.

    For instance, if you have a fashion blog, you can create a how-to post about how to run a fashion brand with only $100. You can also create a list post about 50 fashion trends that will reshape society.

    But how do you know which content type will work?

    Here you can use MonsterInsights to get insights. First, you can look at the top landing page report to see which pages get the most traffic and then create similar content to drive traffic and backlinks.

  2. I did not really know how domain authority can be used as a standard in determining good web till I read this post. However, does commenting on others’ blogs influence domain authority score?

  3. Thanks for your nice content and I will try to follow your good information. My website name is cfwsports.com and this website’s DA 6 but DR .4 but why. I know DA and DR is same. Can you explain me about this subject.

  4. Thanks Syed Balkhi, Even today I have seen alot of sites ranking at the top 3 position just by using tons of blog comment backlinks. Do you think blog commenting is still working in 2021?

  5. “Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs.”

    Why does this seem to confuse so many?

    Part of the issue that (I think) confuses people is the word “authority” and the fact that DA is, obviously, Domain Authority. That word is very powerful and they were wise to use it for marketing.

    Domain Authority

    When people talk about authority, they are talking about a concept that can’t immediately and easily be measured.
    “…authority is very hard to measure. I use that term though, but I doubt I could really explain what I mean haha. I mean there are some clearly authoritative sites like the New York Times or CNN but then there are sites that I’d consider to be authorities in music, for example, but they might not rank over Rolling Stone or anywhere near them.” so what I you say now.

  6. Very appreciated! I was so anxious about my website domain authority, so I searched for how to increase it and I reach here. You explained everything about domain authority in a really simple way. Excellent points you have covered with this article and now I can increase my blog’s DA by applying these points. Many professional SEO experts and developers create a new site, produce high-quality content and distribute it into social media and after a few days their website and blog content go viral very fast and the site has ranked up at the top of Google search results.

    I think having high-quality backlinks is the most important factor that makes a great impact on your site domain authority. Patience is important as we get frustrated with seeing domain scores. I will surely look into all the topics and implement them in my blog. Of course, there are loads of other factors that affect SEO, high quality backlinks are absolutely essential for a good DA level.

    Anyways, thank you very much! I find this post to be very useful!

  7. Syed Balkhi’s 5 Tips to Improve Your Domain Authority covers some key points that can help website owners improve their DA.

    I agree with the author that creating great content, developing a user-friendly site structure, and improving internal links are essential to improving DA.

    One point that I think the author could have elaborated on more is the idea of creating similar content types and topics as the most popular pages on your website.

    It’s essential to create content related to what is already popular on your site. Still, it’s also essential to ensure that the new content is high quality and adds something new to the conversation.

    Simply repurposing old content or regurgitating popular topics will not help improve your DA.

    Another solution the author offers is to improve internal links. Again, this is a valid point, but I think it would be helpful to offer some specific tips on how to go about improving internal links.

    For example, including links in blog posts and articles or adding a resources page with links to popular pages on your website.

    Overall, the author offers some good tips to help website owners improve their DA.

    Creating quality content, improving site structure, and adding internal links are all crucial factors in increasing DA.

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