Table of Contents
- What is Domain Authority?
- Why your Domain Authority matters
- How Rankings Correlate With Referring Domain Metrics
- How to use “Domain Authority”
- How to Improve “Domain Authority” and raise Google SEO
- Domain Authority Checker Tools
What is Domain Authority?
“Domain Authority” is an SEO concept that refers to the “strength” of a given domain, which is also known as “Authority Score” or “Domain Rating”. It runs on a scale from zero to a hundred. The higher a website’s Domain Rating (DR), the stronger and more authoritative it is. If your site has a higher value, then it is also predicted that your position in a search engine is more favorable. Now it’s not necessary to strive for a value of 100, as you’re probably not going to get it.
Why your Domain Authority matters
Google representatives consistently deny the use of “Domain Authority” as a ranking factor. But they have a sitewide score that “maps to similar things.” Plus, according to Ahrefs, Domain Authority (DA) and keyword rankings correlate well. This makes “Domain Authority” a useful metric by which to estimate a website’s ability to get organic traffic from Google.
Also, a study of 900 million web pages in Ahref’s Content Explorer index shows that search traffic correlate well with “Domain Authority”.
How Rankings Correlate With Referring Domain Metrics
However, improving your site’s “authority” should never be your primary goal. You should instead focus on earning backlinks from strong pages on reputable sites in your industry to the pages that you want to rank in Google. That’s because there’s a clear correlation between the number of referring domains to a page and the amount of organic traffic it gets.
There’re three types of factors correlate with rankings of your site page:
- URL & Domain Factors
- Content Factors
- Backlinks Factors
Each of above factors has a weight of High Search Engine Rankings of your website page.
How to use “Domain Authority”
Benchmarking against your competitors
If your website has a higher “authority” than your competitors, it means your site has stronger “link popularity.” Comparing your Domain Rating to other websites in your industry can show if your competitors are performing better or worse than you. If they are doing better, analyze their backlink profile to find new link opportunities.
Check link prospects instead of quantity
Google cares more about the “strength” of the linking page than that of the linking domain. Still, pages on high “authority” domains tend to be stronger than those on low “authority” sites. Link to relevant, high-quality websites and prevent links to spam sites.
How to Improve “Domain Authority” and raise Google SEO
The domain authority is created through various SEO factors. Some examples are:
- Quantity and value of backlinks to the website
- Building and user-friendliness of the website
- The better the site is optimized for SEO, the higher the score of the site.
Raising positions in Google with SEO is not a short term strategy. This requires a long-term and careful SEO approach with a reliable link building strategy or optimizing.
Domain Authority Checker Tools
Here’re some tools to check your domain authority:
