Your Domain Authority (DA) predicts how well your website will perform in people’s online searches when using specific keywords. There are different metrics that measure this “strength” for given domains, like those developed by Moz or Ahrefs. The DA score helps you to evaluate your current Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort but also guides your future SEO marketing strategy.
Before getting too technical, let’s see why your business should care about Domain Authority.
- Domain Authority score tells you how well your business website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, it can predict how easy your potential clients can reach you when using specific keywords in their online searches.
- It helps you in benchmarking against your competitors. If your business website authority is higher than that of your competitors, then your website is more popular and clients can reach you easier and faster.
- You can build new partnerships with other sites that have better DA scores, for brand awareness. Thus, when prospecting for new links on external sites, pay attention to their authority.
- It helps you make SEO marketing decisions, as DA can guide your brand to relevant keywords and relevant websites where to promote your business.
- Domain Authority score evolution works like a barometer of whether your SEO efforts are gaining traction or not.
Now, let’s see in more detail what Domain Authority is and how it works
Domain Authority score is calculated using multiple factors, such as the number of unique domains link to your website, the authority of these linking domains, the number of total links, etc. Some math and coding magic are then applied to come up with a specific score for your website.
- A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100. A higher score means your website is more authoritative, thus it might rank better in search engines for specific keywords.
- Sites with a very large number of high-quality external links are at the top end of the Domain Authority scale, while websites with fewer links have much lower DA scores. A brand new website starts with a DA score of one.
- Use DA as a relative score, not as an absolute value: compare your DA score against your competitors’ DA, not against the upper limit of the score. Your aim is to always have a better DA score than your competitors.
- The DA uses a logarithmic scale, which means that it is much easier to grow your DA score from 20 to 30, but incredibly difficult to jump from 70 to 80.
- While Google in its ranking system cares more about pages, it is proven that pages on high authority domains tend to do better in online searches than those on low authority sites.
- You can measure your Domain Authority for free through websites such as Moz.
If by now you consider DA essential for your online marketing strategy and your new goal is to have a better DA score than your competitors, then our mission is accomplished!
The next step to take: contact Runningfish to improve your DA through smart SEO tactics and the most efficient strategies in getting more external links for your website.