How to increase domain authority of a website?

Domain Authority (DA) is the (metric) number representing your website authority.

The greater your domain authority, the more likely you will rank higher in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). So, increase domain authority and drive organic traffic to your website.

One of the biggest names in the SEO community, Moz was the first company to develop the Domain Authority metric. Since then, many other organizations have developed similar measures that rate domains from 0 to 100 based on a variety of variables.

PageRank was introduced by Google’s Larry Page (one of the founders of Google) as a concept of rating domains based on their authority, which is used to calculate web pages and websites’ value until today.

What is domain authority?

The DA of a website is scored somewhere between 0 and 100. This number predicts what rank a website is likely to get on the search engine result page. Thus, the higher DA, the better is the ranking.

Keep in mind; the DA Ranking Score is not the same as the scoring system used for Google’s (PageRank) ranking, which will impact your rankings.

Moz (and other firms with similar ranking models) attempting to mimic Google’s ranking algorithm by taking all identified variables into consideration that can theoretically influence ranks and score domains for comparison purposes.

This means that the DA relies on Moz’s data from the website, which is also less detailed and less accurate than what is available from Google.

It is not that uncommon for a domain to have a low domain authority score but ranks high on Google.

How to check website domain authority?

So, as per industry giant Moz, the domain authority is determined by using the various signals, including the following:

The number, quality and relevance of incoming backlinks.
The value of the content on your website
Social signals, meaning how well your domain/business and content is performing on social media.
The average output of your website’s SEO

How can I calculate my website’s DA?

The easiest method to calculate your website’s authority is to visit Moz open site explorer, enter your domain name, and look at the result to figure out your domain authority score.

Domain authority VS Page authority?

The page authority (PA) is like DA but uses signals that are unique to a specific page instead of taking domain-wide metrics into account.

The score is a prediction that shows how good a website can be and how high the search engines can rank. A website with more number of high authority pages will also have a high domain authority score by default.

Now that you know what domain authority is and have seen how to calculate it, I am going to share some tips on how to boost your domain authority. Let us get started.

How to increase domain authority?

These are the 9 steps to improve the Domain Authority Score

Improve Off-Page Seo
Fix Your Website’s Technical Seo
Improve On-Page Seo
Keep Your Website Mobile Friendly
Improve Your Page Speed
Improve UX Signals
Improve Social Signals
Rank For Long-tail Keywords
Be Patient

Let us talk about them individually.

Improve Off-Page Seo

When it comes to Off-Page SEO, the most critical metric of all is your backlink profile.

Websites with a solid, healthy backlink profile would have a DA score higher than those with a not so impressive link profile.

What is considered to be a good link profile?

A website with a strong backlink profile will have the following qualities:

Backlinks from other websites with a high DA score
Backlinks from websites in a similar domain
No irrelevant backlinks, especially from low-quality sites (low-quality links)
A high number of unique backlinks

How will your link profile be improved?

The methodology of boosting your backlink profile is called Off-Page SEO. It is connected to strategies that you can use to gain strong links to increase the ranking ultimately.

To enhance your link profile and boost your domain authority, you must, among other things:

Delete lower quality links from your profile
Use platforms such as Moz Explorer or Semrush to identify the low-quality links.
You may then email the website owners and ask them to either delete the link or add the “nofollow tag” to devalue the link.
If it does not work, you can delete your profile links through the Google disavow tool.

Strengthen your link profile

Get strong links from other sites relevant to your business. This is one of the most challenging parts of SEO.

In its own accord, link building is quite enormous! And in my experience, link building is what beginners find the most difficult.

To give you an outline of the procedure, there are two key ways to make successful connections.

#1 Creating a natural link profile

By having excellent content on your website that will draw links from other relevant websites.

When someone finds your website, reads your posts, enjoys it, and links it to one of their articles- that process is known as natural link building.

In order for this to work, it is vital to post link-worthy content on your website.

In other terms, content that is informative, valuable and easy to understand, such that other webmasters would be happy to link to it in their posts.

In reality, this process works and is really helpful, but it can take a bit of time for you to get enough followers, out of which some will post your content in their blogs. So, you need to be patient and vigilant.

#2 Blogger reach

The second way to get strong backlinks is to reach out to other webmasters and tell them about you. By doing so, you raise your chances of linking your posts to their website.

Fix Your Website’s Technical Seo

Technical SEO is thought to be one of the lower-level SEO activities, and generally, if you get your technical SEO right from the start, you wouldn’t have to bother with that again.

On the other hand, if you don’t get technical SEO right, this could have a significant effect on your domain authority and rankings.

You, therefore, need to review important SEO settings, including:

Connect your website with Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster tools.
Build and configure your XML sitemap and upload it to GSC
Test your robots.txt configuration and then use the URL Inspection tool to ensure that Google and other search engine bots can easily crawl your website.
Consider transferring your website to HTTPS if not done already.
Add structured data (schema) details to enable search engines to understand the content context.
Make absolutely sure you have a well-specified breadcrumb menu on all pages.
Use hreflang in case you have a multilingual website.

Learn more about technical SEO

Improve On-Page Seo

Now that we are done with Off-Page SEO and Technical SEO, your on-page SEO is the next thing to tackle. SEO to boost your Domain Authority. On-Page SEO is all about optimizing the content of your website.

My complete SEO tutorial and On-Page SEO guide explain how to boost your ranking with On-Page SEO. Some of the key factors are:

Make sure that the title and meta description of your website and optimized.
Appropriate use of header tags such as H1 H2 in the content
Optimize the Permalink for SEO and enhance the URL structure of your site.
Optimize your media content, including the photos and videos
Ensure that you are using the right keywords in your posts naturally. Avoid overusing and keyword stuffing.
Link your content internally. Interlinking is a powerful SEO technique.
Structuring your content in a way that you have a higher chance of being featured in Google’s featured snippets.
Just as a reminder, your content’s quality is one of the most important factors for On-Page SEO. You must keep the content up to date and original.

Keep Your Website Mobile Friendly

It is no longer optional or good to have a mobile website but is unavoidable. Here are some reasons for it though:

Mobile searches today count for about 60% of total searches. Surpassing the desktop searches.
It is quite common for users to begin their research on mobile and move to desktop at a later stage.
The user-experience on mobile is an important ranking factor
Google is introducing its mobile-first index, and websites that do not support mobile phones will simply not appear on the mobile results
The fact that your domain authority score is detrimentally impacted without a mobile-friendly (or responsive) site

The easiest way to start with is to use a Google Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your website is mobile friendly or not.

If not, Google will provide you with a detailed report and guide you on building your mobile friendly site.

Improve Your Page Speed

Page Speed is one of Google’s established ranking signals, AKA the website that loads rather quickly and has more value as compared to slower loading websites.

Boosting your page speed not only increases your rankings and domain authority but also lets you enhance the user experience, which results in more revenue, leads and registration.

Tackling the page speed problem is not always simple. Many technical elements are involved, and it can be very challenging if you are not a programmer or anyone with engineering expertise.

However, if you are unable to recruit a developer to improve the pace at which you load your website, you should consider:

Eliminating unnecessary plugins
Upgrade the new versions of WordPress (and Plugins).
Call your hosting provider and demand for a report on the efficiency of your server.
Upgrade to a better server if necessary.
Using a plugin to cache (such as w3total cache for WordPress)
Reduce the size of the photos

Learn more about increasing page speed for SEO

Improve UX Signals

In the last few years, Google has started to implement “User Experience signals” in its algorithm, all thanks to RankBrain).

In particular, they evaluate the engagement between consumers and the results and use it to determine site performance.

SEO Experts believe that the below points are the key factors are the essential UX Signals:

Dwell time

The amount of time a Google searcher spends your page before exiting and going back to the Search Engine Result Page.

The higher the dwell time, the more interested the user is in your content, which results in a higher Domain Authority Score

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the ratio of visitors leaving the website without taking any action, such as clicking on a link, completing a form or buying a product/ service.

A high bounce rate is an indication of bad UX, which can impact your rankings and DA.

Pogo Sticking

Often, you click on the first result on the Google SERP, and don’t get what you are searching for. You will return to SERP and click on the next link.

This is called Pogo Sticking. It is an SEO term coined by Google, which explains what happens when a visitor from a search engine results page (SERP) reaches your site and then leaves to go back to the SERPs. And then, click on the next link or go to a separate website.

If several people are pogo-sticking to the same query, Google can see this as a strong indication that the consumers are not pleased with the #1 result and will lower your website’s ranking.

Click-Through Rate

Organic click-through-rate (AKA “Organic CTR”) is the number of searchers clicking on your website’s link from the search engine. The higher the CTR, the better it is for your Domain Authority.

Search Intent

When submitting a query in the search engine, the primary aim of a user is called the Search Intent or User Intent. Popularly users are looking for information, price of product/service, navigational queries, and transaction.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is one of the latest SEO Trends and is technically a collection of parameters that Google finds vital for a website’s overall user experience.

Core Web Vitals consist of three primary metrics: largest content paint, first input latency, and cumulative layout shift.

Improve Social Signals

While Google officially has consistently announced that Google Ranking algorithms do not contain social signals, there is a strong correlation between high ranking pages and social signals.

Google’s high ranking pages tend to have lots of views, likes, shares, and social media factors. In order to improve the domain authority, it is important that you:

Put efforts on your Facebook company page and aim to gain more followers
Are engaged in some social media networks, such that you have some traction to content posted by you
Add a social media button on your pages to make it easier for readers to share your posts
Verify that your content is a good look and feel when
people use the social media buttons to share their content

Rank For Long-tail Keywords

Long-tail Keywords are relevant phrases, typically 3 to 4 words long, and are used to target audiences at the bottom of the funnel.

In comparison to short keywords, long-tail keywords have lesser competition and are easier to rank.

Although this generally means that there is less search volume, using long-tail keywords is one of the easiest ways to create highly effective content that resonates with your target audience.

If you use long-tail keywords in your SEO strategy, you can take advantage of the positive influence of a more comprehensive marketing framework.

Additionally, as long-tail keywords are low in volume, you can easily rank #1 for them on search engines. When your website ranks on the first page of SERP, it is a clear indication of high-quality content, increasing your Domain Authority Score.

Learn more about raking for Long-Tail Keywords

Be Patient

As I mentioned earlier, it is not possible to boost your domain authority in one day.

Moz crawlers will have to read and review your website after making all of the improvements listed above, so you have to be patient.

Trust the process and understand that systemic enhancement of your Google rankings would also favorably impact your domain authority score.

Conclusion

Don’t get too consumed with your domain authority ranking to finish it.

It is just a number that demonstrates how powerful your domain is compared to other domains in the Moz database.

A lower DA score does not really mean that your website would not perform well on your Google.

It is just a forecast because even a high DA score means you’re on the right track, but it doesn’t ensure you will definitely rank high on the SERP.

When it comes to building a high-ranking quality website, just concentrate on your website’s content and provide a great customer experience.

If all things go well, your site will achieve the top ranks on Google and other search engines over time.