What Is Domain Authority (DA) And How To Increase DA For Higher Search Engine Ranking In 2022?

domain authority

If you want to rank higher in Google and get more organic traffic to your website, you might have read that increasing your domain authority is the solution.

Domain authority is a metric developed by Moz. The higher your domain authority is, the more likely you are to earn a higher search engine ranking and to receive more and better web traffic.

Your domain authority is also a good way to measure your SEO efforts as well as compare the strength of your website to your competition’s websites.

What is Domain Authority?

DA is a metric created by SEO tool Moz that aims to calculate how authoritative a website is. It does this by analyzing the site’s backlink profile and giving it a score out of 100.  Domain authority (DA) refers to the number of relevant backlinks—links to your website from other reputable sites—your site has. The relevance of those backlinks also contributes to your score.

Why do you want to increase Domain Authority?

This may sound like a strange question coming from an employee of the company that created Domain Authority, but it’s the most important question I can ask you. What’s your end-goal? Domain Authority is designed to be an indicator of success (more on that in a moment), but it doesn’t drive success. DA is not used by Google and will have no direct impact on your rankings. Increasing your DA solely to increase your DA is pointless vanity.

How to Check Your Domain Authority?

The easiest way to check the Domain Authority of a website is to use the free Moz Domain Analysis tool.

Just enter the URL of the website you want to search for, and the tool will show you its Domain Authority score alongside other useful info. This includes top pages by links and the number of ranking keywords.

How is the domain authority calculated?

According to Moz, they calculate Domain Authority by taking into account a number of signals (40 in total) including:

  • The number of incoming links pointing to your website.
  • The quality and relevancy of incoming links
  • The quality of your website’s content
  • Social Signals (the popularity of your domain and contain in social media networks)
  • Your website’s SEO performance in general

Is page authority different from domain authority?

Page Authority (PA) is similar to DA but instead of taking into account domain-wide metrics, it uses signals that are specific to a particular page. The given score is a prediction that indicates the strength of a page and how well it can rank on search engines. A website that has a lot of high authority pages, will also have a higher DA (domain authority) score.

Now that it is clear what domain authority is and how it is calculated, let’s see how you can improve your domain authority.

Steps On How To Increase Your Domain Authority

Now that you understand why domain authority is important and the ranking factors used by Moz to determine a website’s domain authority, you’re probably wondering how you can put that to use in order to actually increase your domain authority score.

1. Create Better Content
Creating content that people want to link to is the first step to better link building.

People typically link to unique content. For example:

  • Reports or studies.
  • Breaking news in which you are a source.
  • Unique and interesting opinions.
  • Useful tools.
  • Interesting long-form content.
  • Statistics round ups.

Your content should be world-class: better than anything else out there on the topic. If it isn’t, people will simply link to competing sites.

The ideal scenario is that people will find your content naturally and link to it in their articles.

Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen. Especially if you don’t have much traffic in the first place. In this case, you may have to promote your content via outreach.

2. Optimize Your On-Page Content
Improving the on-page SEO quality of your website is critical. It will not only improve the domain rankings on Google but also increase the DA score on Moz. However, on-page factors do not directly affect the DA score.  But if you do things wrong, it can impact the rankings on Google and indirectly reflect in your DA score.  Meta Title, Description, Alt Text, Internal link, etc., are some of the factors that Moz considers while checking the on-page SEO score of your webpage.

3. Increase Your Social Signals
Although there is not much talked about the impact of Social Signals on DA, since Moz considers a lot of external factors before deciding the DA of a website, we believe that social signal is one of the factors.

Even though Google is yet to confirm whether Social Signal is part of the algorithm, the pages that are ranking in top positions on Google SERP usually have a high social share.

The way to increase the social signal of your website is to make sure that you actively share interesting posts through the official channels.

In addition to this, you can also add social media icons to the website so that Google can easily understand the signal.

4. Attract Better Links
Once your site is established, you won’t improve your Domain Authority as much from low DA sites. Although attracting links of all kinds can still be part of your strategy, you should focus more on achieving better quality links from sites with good domain authority.

Conclusion

If you want to increase your website’s DA, you need to be building links. This can be difficult to do naturally and you may benefit from a dedicated link building strategy.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to implement one on your own, then consider hiring Perfect Web Creations to do the job. We specialize in building high quality-links at scale for businesses in a variety of niches. Contact us to get free proposal.