With over 1 billion websites on the internet today, how can you easily gauge if your website has the capacity to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs)?
Answer: Domain Authority
Developed by the SEO gurus at Moz, Domain Authority (DA) is a score that predicts how well a website will rank on SERPs. DA score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
To better understand what Domain Authority is, In this infographic I will walk us through how it came to be and everything that you need to know about it while taking care of the ranking of your website.
- What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is metric developed by Moz which provides a website owner the insight of how Google’s search algorithm will rank their website based on their website’s authority or credibility on the web. Since there are hundreds of factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking websites, DA makes it easier so even non-SEO savvy business owners can understand how well their website would perform competitively against other websites in their own niche.
- Where Can I Check My DA Score?
Because of its popularity, many other SEO and online marketing platforms in the market have incorporated this metric on their tools these days. It is also embedded into all of Moz’s SEO tools such as Open Site Explorer, MozBar, and in the SERP analysis section of Keyword Explorer.
All these tools are so simple to use and will enable you to keep track your website metrics so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of it!
- What is Considered “Good” DA?
Perhaps you have already seen your DA score way before but just gave it a shrug because you don’t have any idea of how it reflects your website’s performance.
Popular websites such as Google and Wikipedia are at the top end of the Domain Authority scale, all because they are already well-established and has a very large number of high-quality external links.
Somewhere in the middle of the scale are small businesses and websites with fewer inbound links. If your website was just created recently, then you can expect that your website is still at the bottom end of DA scale.
Below is a simple chart that will help you better understand the performance and competitiveness of your website as related to Moz’s Domain Authority.
- 1-10: Poor – Odds are your site domain name is fairly new. It shows room for a lot of improvement and growth.
- 11-20: Decent – Your website might be pretty, but, it is not fundamentally sound.
- 21-30: Fair – Your site is starting to show signs of good SEO fundamentals, but there still are some basic improvements needed.
- 31-40: Competitive – Your website is starting to drive traffic to your site. Not bad. Now, you need to begin working on advanced SEO best practices.
- 41-50: Good – Your site has made some nice strides forward. You now want to increase your blogging consistency.
- 51-60: Strong – Your website is above average, it is getting good traffic, and is optimized well.
- 61-70: Excellent – Your site is great within its niche area of focus. Your site is highly recognized and has a lot of back-links.
- 71-80: Outstanding – Your website is on the top of all the search engine page results. Just keep doing what got you here.
- 81-90: Superior – Your site has elite status authority. Most likely, this is the highest your site will reach.
- 91-100: Rare – These websites are staple names such as Wikipedia, Twitter, ESPN, etc. Only a micro-fraction of all sites reach this level.
However, it’s important to take note that DA is best used as a comparative metric when determining which sites may have more powerful ranking capabilities than others, rather than an absolute, concrete source when gauging if a website will top the SERPs or not.
- What are the Factors That Affect DA Score?
As stated earlier, Domain Authority score is based on a scale of 100. It combines many SEO factors such as page loading speed, recency of content updates, and keywords, along with key elements that make up DA:
- Website’s age
- Popularity
- Backlinks
- MozRank – Quantifies link popularity
- MozTrust- Measures a form of link equity that is tied to the “trustworthiness” of the linking website
When scoring your website’s DA, Moz uses their Mozscape web index that calculates your inbound and outbound links, and other factors mentioned above.
- How Is It Different from Page Authority?
Many novices have mistakenly identified Domain Authority with Page Authority. While Domain Authority measures the overall ranking strength of an entire domain or subdomain, Page Authority measures the strength of individual pages. E-commerce websites are particularly critical to Page Authority as it allows them to measure the competitiveness of each product pages of their website against the pages of their competitors.
- How Can I Increase My DA Score?
These are some ways to improve your DA score:
- Ensure that your technical SEO is in place. This includes your URL structure, robots.txt, site structure, meta tags, header tags, word count, keywords, etc.
- Create linkable contents. This could be in the form of blogs or infographics -what’s important is that they are powerful, authoritative and provides value to your audience.
- Develop strong internal linking. This makes the inner workings of your website connected and unbreakable.
- Regularly remove bad backlinks. If your site if full of spammy backlinks, you DA will remain relatively low.
- Diversify your backlinks. Instead of publishing a bunch of guest posts from one single authoritative site, it is wise if you get links from a diverse range of authority sites. This increases your chance for higher DA while also reaching a different set of audience.
- How Important Is DA To My Website?
As a business owner, you can see DA as your online thermometer which allows you to gauge if your website is still on par with its competitor or not. Moreover, it measures your digital business in relation to search engine ranking, propagation of visitors via inbound links, mentions, etc., and reliability of your website compared to other websites.
Just as a thermometer measures body temperature, DA allows us to know if we are falling short on the digital side of our business, to the effects of poor SEO techniques may have on your website and other critical areas which you should improve.
Although getting a 100 DA score seems impossible, it is important to aim and work for as high a score as possible. Doing so will allow you to be closer to the desired goals you want your website to achieve.
Have some issues in your Domain Authority score lately? Harris Myers can help! Call us at +353 (0)1 5349 454 or send an email
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