7 steps to increase your domain authority

What is your domain authority?

The Domain Authority (DA) is an indicator that grades the quality of your company’s website. Specifically, the domain authority measures the quality of your SEO. As a result, the higher your domain authority is, the more visitors you attract to your website and, in the first place, conquer more new customers.

This is how we describe it:

Domain authority is developed by Moz. Other companies like SEMrush also have similar metrics. No link with Google. This is a modeling essay from Google’s algorithm that assigns a rating to any website. Since this rating is essentially based on the number and backlinks, working on it can not hurt your SEO.

So I’m going to define domain authority and then give you 7 practical tips to increase it. And most importantly, I hope to make you want to further follow your domain authority (DA). It’s a solid metric for how your website’s SEO is changing over time.

What is the domain authority (DA) of a website?

The Domain Authority (DA) of a website is a score between 0 and 100 that tries to predict how a website ranks on search engines.

The closer your score is to 100, the better.

This DA note is based on a metric scale. In other words, the higher your score, the less difficult it is to progress.

On the other hand, the DA is a metric totally disconnected from the ranking metrics established by Google.

In fact, Moz is trying to simulate Google’s ranking algorithm based on known criteria.

But as Google’s algorithm is secret, with over 200 factors and constantly evolving, Moz was unable to have a precise estimate.

However, this approximation is good enough for SEO experts to use it and track the organic SEO progress of a website.

Moz works similar to Google, it retrieves data from the Web, put them in its index and calculates the domain authority.

But as it is not the same power of calculation as Google, Moz can do it only once a month.

Therefore, when you make changes to your company website, your DA does not change immediately.

Recommendations: Your DA rating is primarily used to evaluate your SEO progress and compare yourself with your competitors.

How is the domain authority calculated?

Moz indicates that the domain authority is calculated with a number of criteria which include:

• The number of inbound links (Backlinks) pointing to your website,
• The quality and relevance of these incoming links,
• The quality of the content published on your website,
• The popularity of your domain on social networks,
• The quality of SEO (Organic SEO) of your website.

Where can I find out about the DA of my business website?

To find out your domain authority score, go to Moz’s Link Explorer tool, enter your domain name and check the results.

Note: Open Site Explorer (OSE) index tool is no longer updated. Moz returns today on Link Explorer which has the same functions.
Basically, it’s a reinstatement for Open Site Explorer which was Moz’s tool for link discovery, competitive analysis, and link building.

What is the authority of a page?

The page authority (PA) is similar to the domain authority (DA). It is an indicator of the ability of a page to rank.

Instead of taking the entire domain into account, the page authority notes the performance of a particular page.

A website with many pages with strong authority also has a high domain authority (DA).
The page authority is based on three factors, namely:

• Age and trust
• Value received from links
• Page last update and relevance

Age and trust

The pages that have been on the Internet for years with good results have already earned their right to position themselves well on the results pages. New pages, as well as new domains, must first prove their qualities before they can position themselves for competitive keywords. Give your page time and take good care of it: write good content and get quality backlinks.

Value received from links

Each link has authority, external links as well as internals bring some authority to the landing page and thus influence the authority of this page.

last page update

Search engines prefer pages that are frequently updated. Regularly review the contents of your most important pages and whenever possible, update them. Do not forget the relevance. It takes more than a high page authority for a page to rank well. Relevance for specific keywords is also crucial. The relevance is gained with the content of the page, which must include these keywords and internal links, as well as backlinks (or external links).

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

In fact, any action taken to increase the authority of your domain will also improve your rankings on the search engines.

Now that you have mastered the notion of ‘domain authority’ and know how it is calculated, let’s look at how to improve your domain authority.

7 tips to improve your domain authority

As you will see, the same approach to improve your DA is the same for the 3 elements of SEO as I will describe.

1. Work on your ‘off page’ SEO

In fact, backlinks are the most important priority factor in Moz’s algorithm.

That’s by the way, what appears right to the right of your domain authority note on the Link Explorer screen.

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

What is a strong link profile?

According to Moz, a good link profile has the following characteristics:

• Inbound links from websites with strong authority,
• Inbound links from websites dealing with the same subject,
• And incoming links from many different websites,
• No bad links.

How to improve your link profile?

In fact, improving your link profile is based on the ‘off Page” SEO techniques, one of the 3 subdomains of SEO.

So it’s all about getting quality backlinks by promoting your content.

To enhance your link profile and, among other things, improve your domain authority, you take 2 actions:

• Eliminate bad links,
• Get quality links.

Remove bad links

This process involves using a tool like Moz Explorer or SEMrush to find the toxic links.

Then contact the managers of the websites and ask them to remove the link or add the attribute ‘nofollow’ to undervalue the power of the link.

For site managers that do not respond, use the tool to disavow links in your Google Search Console in order to remove the negative impact of these links.

Get good links from other relevant websites

It is probably the most difficult task of SEO.

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

To give you an overview, there are mainly 2 ways to get good inbound links:

• Publish quality content,
• Ensure their promotion.

Publish quality content on your website

Posting quality content is the best way to get ‘natural’ backlinks.

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

As a result, the first step is to publish content that your readers will like.

That is relevant, useful and easy content.

In practice, you must be very patient.

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

Promote your articles

The second way to get good backlinks is to contact other websites to let them know you exist.

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

2. Optimize your site’s ‘On page’ SEO

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

‘On page’ SEO is about optimizing your page and its content.

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

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

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

3. Work on your technical SEO 

Technical SEO is the third part of the process.

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

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

On the other hand, if one of the aspects of the technical SEO is not correct, it has a strong impact on your domain authority and therefore on your rankings in the search result pages.

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

• Setup your website on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools,
• Submit your XML sitemap to Google,
• Test your robots.txt file on the Google Search Console to make sure Google and other search engines can crawl your website without problems,
• Secure your website with an SSL certificate (https),
• Add structured data to help search engines better understand your content …

4. Have a mobile-friendly website 

Not having a compatible website for small screens of a smartphone has a negative impact on your domain authority.

In addition, having a mobile-compatible website is no longer an option. It is mandatory.

Here are some reasons:

48% of searches in North America are done on mobile (source Google Research),
Many Internet users start their search on mobile and pursue it on a computer,
Mobile Compatibility is a Google Ranking factor
Google deploys its Mobile First Index that takes into account the content of your website on Mobile to rank your pages.

Recommendations: to avoid having 2 sites to manage (one for a computer, another for mobile), opt for a responsive design that adapts naturally and automatically to the size of the devise screen of your users.

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

My tip: To make sure your website is mobile-friendly, use Google’s free mobile tool.

The report in this tool provides all the recommendations for making your website mobile-friendly.

5. Optimize the loading time of your pages

One of the known factors of Google’s rankings is the page speed.

A website that loads slowly is penalized.

Speeding up your pages improves:

Not only your ranking in Google’s result pages and your domain authority,
But also the user experience which translates into more conversion: sales, prospects, registrations …
Solving the page speed problems of your website is not always easy.

Nevertheless, to save time on the technical aspects without using your developer, here are the actions to take to optimize the website of your company:

• Delete unnecessary extensions,
• Use the latest versions of your CMS (WordPress or other) and your extensions,
• Ask your website hosting for a report on your server’s performance. If necessary, pay yourself a more powerful server.
• Use a caching plugin, like W3 Total Cache,
• Compress your images with an extension, like tiny jpg or png
• Use YouTube or Vimeo to host your videos instead of running your own server …

6. Increase your social shares

Although officially, Google has repeatedly stated that social shares are not part of its Google algorithm, it seems that there is a correlation between pages well ranked on Google and the social commitments of these pages.

It’s normal. Popular pages in Google also tend to receive more Likes, shares, tweets …

To increase your domain authority, here are some actions to take:

• Work on your profiles on LinkedIn and try to increase your connections,
• Be active on social networks to promote your content to collect more Likes, tweets, + 1 on Google + …

Not to mention, add the social sharing buttons on all your pages to facilitate sharing for your visitors …

7. Have patience

Increasing your domain authority does not happen overnight.

It takes time for Moz bots to evaluate your website once the above changes are made. You must be patient.

In any case, working consistently on improving your rankings in Google also has a positive effect on your domain authority score. And vice versa!

Conclusion on how to improve your domain authority

To conclude, do not be too obsessed with your domain authority (DA).

For me, it’s just a number that measures the strength of your area compared to your competitors.

In addition, a low DA does not mean that your website is not ranked well on Google.

On the other hand, a strong authority means that you are on the right path without any guarantee of obtaining a better ranking on Google.

Whatever it is, please check regularly your Google Search Console and have a complete check-up on your website.

Nothing like Google to help you progress on Google! Now, what are you going to do with these techniques to get your domain authority (DA)?