What is your domain authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is an indicator that scores the quality of your business website.

More precisely, the domain authority measures the quality of your Natural Referencing (SEO).

Therefore, the higher your domain authority is, the more people visit your website, and, a priori, you win more customers.

This is how Mohd Shahrukh talks about it:

I will thus define Domain authority for you and then provide seven practical tips to improve it.

And most importantly, I want you to be more attentive to your domain authority (DA). It is a reliable metric to measure how your website SEO changes over time.

 

What’s the domain authority (DA) of a website?

The Domain Authority (or DA score) of a website measures how well it ranks in search engines. It can range between 0 to 100.

The closer you are to 100, the more beneficial.

This DA rating uses a logarithmic scale. The logarithmic scale means that the higher the score, the more difficult it is to improve.

The DA, on the other hand, is a metric that is not related to the Google ranking.

Moz is trying out to imitate Google’s ranking algorithm using known criteria.

But, since Google’s algorithm is secret, with more than 200 criteria and constantly evolving, Moz has difficulty getting an accurate estimate.

That being said, this approximation is good enough that SEO experts use it to track a website’s SEO progress.

Moz works similar to Google; it pulls data from the web, puts it in its index, and calculates domain authority.

But since it doesn’t have the same computing power as Google, Moz can only do this once a month.

As a result, your DA does not immediately change when you make changes to your business website.

 

How does domain authority get calculated?

Moz signifies that the domain authority is calculated using a variety of criteria, including:

• The number of backlinks (inbound links) that point to your website,
• The quality and relevancy of these backlinks,
• Your website’s content quality,
• Your domain’s popularity on social media,
• The quality of the Natural Referencing (SEO) of your website.

 

Where can you find the DA for your company’s website?

To find your domain authority rating, go to Moz’s Link Explorer tool, enter your domain name, and view the result.

Note: The index of the OSE (Open Site Explorer) tool is no longer updated. Moz refers today to Link Explorer, which has the same functions.

 

What is the authority of a page?

Page Authority (PA) is the same as Domain Authority (DA).

Instead of looking at the whole domain, the page authority scores the performance of a particular page.

A website that has many pages with strong authority will also have high domain authority (DA).

 

Why do you want to improve your domain authority (DA)?

Any action taken to increase the authority of your domain will also improve your search engine rankings.

Now that you have mastered the concept of “domain authority” and know how it is calculated, let’s look at improving it.

 

7 Effective Suggestions to Improve Your Domain Authority

 

As you will see, the same tactics to improve your AD are the same as I describe to you in all my articles on Natural Referencing (SEO), whose three subdomains are related in the image above.

 

1. Work on your “Off page” SEO

Indeed, inbound links (backlinks) are a priori the essential criterion in Moz’s algorithm.

This is, by the way, what appears just to the right of your domain authority note on the Link Explorer screen.

Moz talks about link profile which is the set of links that point to your site.

What is a strong link profile?

Moz identifies that a good link profile should have the following characteristics:

• Inbound links from websites with strong authority,
• Inbound linking from websites that are related to the subject,
• And inbound links from many different websites,
• No shoddy link.

How to improve your link profile?

Improving your link profile relies on “Off page” SEO techniques, one of the three subdomains of SEO.

It is, therefore, a question of doing everything to obtain quality backlinks by promoting your content appropriately.

To strengthen your link profile and, among other things, improve your domain authority, you take two actions:

• Eliminate bad links,
• Get quality links.

Remove bad links

To locate toxic links, this process requires the use of a tool like Moz Explorer or SEMrush.

Then contact the website maintainers and ask them to remove the link or add the “nofollow” attribute to devalue the power of the link.

For those responsible for unresponsive sites, use the disavow link tool in your Google Search Console to remove the negative impact of these links.

Get good links from other related websites.

This is undoubtedly the most challenging task of Natural Referencing (SEO).

Any Digital Marketing expert will tell you that getting quality backlinks is a topic in its own right.

To give you an overview, there are mainly two ways to get good inbound links:

• Publish quality content,
• Ensure their promotion.

Publish quality content on your website

Publishing quality content is the best way to obtain backlinks “naturally”.

The principle is as follows: if an Internet user reads one of your articles and appreciates it, he will refer to it in his content.

Therefore, the first step is to publish content that your readers will like.

That is to say, relevant, valuable, and accessible content.

In practice, you have to be very patient.

Indeed, it takes time to gain your readers’ trust, so that some Internet users in your industry want to quote your content in theirs.

Promote your articles

Contacting other websites to let them that you are available is the second way to gain backlinks.

In this way, you increase your chances of getting links pointing to your business website.

2. Optimize your “On page” SEO

To improve your domain authority, you should also optimize the SEO of your pages.

On-page optimization is all about optimizing your web page and its content.

Among 11 points to optimize, here are the main ones:

• Optimize your title and meta description,
• Cut out your content with subtitles,
• Optimize the structure of URLs,
• Compress the weight and optimize the referencing of your images,
• Use keywords naturally in your content without jamming,
• Add internal links to your content,
• Work on the formatting of your content to facilitate readability.

Note: obviously, your content must be updated regularly to prevent it from becoming obsolete.

 

3. Work on your technical referencing

“Technical” SEO is the third sub-domain of Natural SEO.

This concerns your website, that is to say, the container of your content.

In general, these rather technical actions only have to be done once.

On the other hand, if one of the aspects of technical SEO is not correct, it substantially impacts your domain authority and, therefore, your rankings on Google search pages.

Among the 16 critical parameters of Technical Referencing, the main ones are:

• Declare your website to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools,
• Submit your XML sitemap to Google,
• To make sure that Google and other search engines can crawl the website, test your robots.txt on Google Search Console,
• Secure your website using an SSL certificate (HTTPS),
• Structured data can be added to search engines to understand your content better.

 

4. Have a mobile-friendly website

Not having a compatible website for small smartphone screens negatively impacts your domain authority.

Furthermore, mobile-friendly websites are no longer an option. It is mandatory.

Here are a few reasons:

• 1/3 of searches in France are done on mobile (source StatCounter ),
• Many Internet users start their research on mobile and continue it on a computer,
• Compatibility on mobile is a ranking criterion for Google,
• Google is deploying its Mobile-First Index, which considers your website’s content on mobile to rank your pages.

Note: you can also make your pages compatible with the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format.

 

The report of this tool shows all the recommendations to make your website compatible on mobile.

5. Optimize the loading speed of your web pages

One of the criteria known to Google’s ranking algorithm is page speed.

A website that loads slowly is penalized.

Speeding up the speed of your pages improves:

• Not only your ranking in Google results pages and your domain authority,
• But also the user experience that transmutes into more conversion: sales, prospects, registrations.

Solving problems with your website speed isn’t always easy.

However, to save time on the technical aspects without calling on your developer, here are the actions to take to optimize your company’s website :

• Remove unnecessary extensions,
• Make sure you are using the most recent versions of your CMS (WordPress, or another) and extensions,
• Ask your web host for a report on the performance of your server. You can upgrade to a more powerful server if you feel it is necessary.
• Use a caching plugin, like WP Rocket,
• Compress your images with an extension, like Imagify,
• Use YouTube to host your videos instead of running your server.

 

6. Increase your social signals

Although Google has officially stated on numerous occasions that social signals are not part of its Google algorithm, there appears to be a correlation between high-ranking pages on Google and the social engagements of those pages.

It’s normal. Most popular pages in Google tend to get more likes, shares, and tweets.

These are the steps you can take to improve your domain authority:

• Improve LinkedIn profile, and you should try to grow your network,
• To increase your Likes and tweets, be active on social media.
• Not to mention the social sharing buttons on all your pages to facilitate sharing for your visitors.

 

7. Be patient

Increasing your domain authority doesn’t happen overnight.

It takes time for Moz bots to evaluate your website after the above changes are made. So you have to be patient.

Either way, improving your Google ranking can also have a positive effect on your domain authority score. And vice versa!

 

Conclusion on how you can improve your domain authority

To conclude, don’t get too obsessed with your domain authority (DA).

To me, it’s just a number that measures the strength of your domain relative to your competition.

Plus, a low DA doesn’t mean your website isn’t ranking well on Google.

On the other hand, a strong authority means that you are on the right track with no guarantee of getting better rankings on Google.

Either way, check your Google Search Console regularly and run an entire website checkup.

Google is the best tool to help you get on Google!

Are you going to use these techniques to get your domain authority (DA)?