What is Domain Authority?
There are a variety of ways that SEO tools like Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs grade websites to determine how they might rank against competitors in search results like Google. One of those ways is Domain Authority (DA). Once you know your website's Domain Authority, you can use it as a baseline to increase your website's search ranking over competitors in Google.
Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100, and indicate how high on a search engine results page (SERP) a given website is likely to appear. The higher the number, the higher a website is likely to appear in Google. Domain Authority also signifies the credibility of your business. One way to increase your DA is to have many high quality backlinks from other sites back to yours.
How do I find my domain authority?
Makeshark can provide internet marketing services and a full SEO audit of your website that includes your Domain Authority, along with other valuable information to help you understand how to improve your search ranking in Google (contact us).
How do SEO tools calculate domain authority?
Domain Authority is calculated on a scale from 1 to 100 using information on the web relating to a specific domain. That means that a few small improvements to your SEO might increase your DA from 10 to 20. Though once you're DA is high, it is much harder to move from 90 to 95.
One of the main factors that goes into the Domain Authority are backlinks. Websites with high Domain Authority can pass along some of that credibility to you if there is a URL on their site that links back to yours (aka, a "backlink"). The more backlinks you can get from high authority websites, the more likely you are to increase your own Domain Authority.
What is considered a high domain authority score?
Websites that are seen as credible sources in their field, like WebMB or Forbes for instance, are often linked to a lot and thus have higher Domain Authority scores. These sites have DA scores over 90, while new websites without any backlinks start out with 1.
Is domain authority worth worrying about?
Domain Authority is important if you are trying to rank higher than your competitors in search results. If your competitors all have DA scores in the 20s, then you don’t need to worry about getting a score in the 80s, just be higher than your competitors. One great way to organically boost your Domain Authority is with backlinks. You can either create directory listings on a bunch of websites manually, or use a tool like BrightLocal: Local Citation Builder.
How do you increase your domain authority?
One of the best way increase your website's Domain Authority is by getting backlinks from other website that already have a high Domain Authority. The more high quality backlinks that you get, the more Google is inclined to rank you higher in search results. A few of the most common ways to get backlinks to your website are:
Directory Listing
Guest Blogging
Press Releases
In addition to backlinks, there are a few other things you can do to increase your Domain Authority:
Choose a domain name with keywords about your product, service, and location.
Optimize your website content, including page titles tags, description tags, image alt tags, headers, paragraphs, and make sure you are using variations of your main keywords.
Link to other relevant content within your website.
Make your website mobile-friendly. You can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test.
Is domain authority and official Google ranking factor?
Domain Authority is a score that SEO tools use to determine how a website will rank on search engine result pages and it is not an official measurement used by Google. However, testing shows that websites with higher Domain Authority rank higher because the are overall more optimized for search. This means that website with high Domain Authority have more high quality backlinks, better website content, and other factors that help websites rank higher.
Can domain authority go down?
Yes. Remember, Domain Authority is relative to your competitors. So if they are doing something to increase their Domain Authority, that may inversely bring your score down. Other ways a score could down is if your SEO tools changes its scoring algorithm or you lose backlinks.