There is no denying that a website’s ranking potential relies hugely on Domain Authority (DA). It is presently considered a gold standard to measure how solid your domain is compared to other similar sites. In the early 2019, Moz had made critical updates to it, but this is not something you should worry about.
But before we dig deep into its updated version, let’s shed some light on Domain Authority as a whole.
What’s Domain Authority?
In essence, Domain Authority is a score that predicts how well your website ranks in search engine result pages (SERPs). But, let’s clear up one common misconception associated with DA.
Google, by no means, uses Domain Authority as a metric and DA doesn’t directly impact SERPs. Developed by Moz, it is basically used for site comparison and to monitor ranking potential of a website over time.
That said, it’s still a crucial factor to consider for some really great reasons!
What Makes DA So Important?
The answer to why DA is so important for your business is related to the visibility of your brand. In general, your DA reflects how much your users trust your website as an authoritative entity in your niche or industry – in comparison to your competitors.
If you are unaware of your DA, it is quite easy for you to lose out on relevant traffic and revenue-generating opportunities, only to be left behind in the competition.
What Are the Changes in the New Domain Authority?
To be precise, the bulk of the modifications are technical in nature. Here are a few that you must know:
- In place of training DA against untouched, huge sets of search results, Moz replaced it with a neural network, allowing it to find link manipulation.
- The metric now better understands websites that don’t rank for keywords.
- Moz’s very own spam score and link distributions (quality and traffic-based) have been integrated with DA.
These updates have surely made Domain Authority more functional and reliable, but there are a few thing to keep in mind when you consider it:
- Do not use it as a standalone metric to compare yourself with your competitors.
- Consider ongoing updates as Moz tends to keep it updated with Google updates
- Don’t fret if your DA score dropped a bit with the 2019 update.
How Challenging Is Improving Domain Authority?
When you begin building your Domain Authority, your present DA score is something you should look at first. But, that would definitely make you think, what’s considered a good DA score?
Answer to this can be somewhat complicated as DA is a comparative metric. This means, you shouldn’t just aim at achieving a very high score. No doubt, that would be just great, but merely doing so won’t give any real benefits.
Rather, you should assess how you can build your score in your industry and further aim at attain a higher score than your competitors. To be true, there’s nothing like bad or good score. What matters is how well you can outperform your competitors.
You should also remember that DA scores are based on a logarithmic scale of 1 – 100. While you can easily hop from 10 to 20 or 30, drifting from the score of 60+ to 80 or above can be taxing.
Now that you know the basics of Domain Authority and its 2019 updates, let’s see how you can boost your DA, especially if it has dropped a bit after the roll out of the DA’s new version.
Improve Your DA Score in Six Easy Ways
1. ObservingYour Present Page Rankings:It is almost impossible to know what exactly is responsible for your low DA score and SERP rankings without analysing the data from some useful SEO tools. However, that doesn’t always mean that you have to look outside of Moz as you can effortlessly determine your score using a handful of tools within Moz.
MozBar, Link Explorer and Keyword Explorer are some excellent tools offered by Moz that can surely come in handy in understanding your current score, comparing it with your competitors’ scores and determining possible reasons for the drop. Those who want to go the extra mile, can go beyond Moz and make use of other SEO analytics platforms, such as Ahrefs and Bright Edge.
2. Assessing Your Competitors: You should monitor what your competitors are doing and what’s causing their scores to rise. You can make use of free competitor analysis and SEO analysis tools that allow you to compare your website with your competitors’ website on the basis of factors like number of links, domain authority, keyword rankings, etc. Additionally, SEMrush is one tool that is highly recommended. It comes with a domain vs. domain feature that offers you a juxtaposed comparison of your website and similar websites for different keywords.
But, make sure not to cease at these insights and reports from competitors as you would need to do some manual exploration too going forward. This may include subscribing to your competitors’ newsletters, and following them on social media to get the hang of their marketing tactics and find how effective they are.
3. Creating Links the Right Way: Links to your website works as a credibility booster. These links present your websites in front of search engines as an authoritative force in a particular niche. Backlinks significantly helps up your DA score as well as SERP rankings. If your visitors think of your site as a credible source of information, they would never hesitate spreading your message. And with that, it is quite obvious for them to link to your website. More backlinks from your users means your website is more likely to be seen as useful and dependable by search engines. However, that doesn’t mean you should acceptwhatever comes to you. Follow the three rules below:
- Never add substandard backlinks
- Remove all existing bad backlinks
- Give value to internal linking
4. Being Cautiousabout Possible Website Penalties: Google typically penalises sites that follow black SEO practices. However, site may still be downgraded even if marketers are not involved in such unapproved practices. One possible reason could be low quality links. Since the roll out of Google Penguin Update, websites have continuously been penalised for low-quality links.
In case youthink that your site has possibly been a victim of down-ranking oryour website has been removed off SERPs altogether due to spam or other related issues, it is suggested to make use of Google Webmaster Tools and examine the Manual Actions report. Here you can find penalties that have impacted either your complete site or individual pages. This gives you the chance to fix the underlying issues and restore your rankings.
5. Improving User Experience: User experience plays a pivotal role in letting visitors decide whether they should link to your website or not. Therefore, for a better user experience, assess your content structure and site navigation. Breaking your content into particular sections as well as subsections can make it easier for your users to find what exactly they need on your website. Specific font colour, size and style along with design choices are other things to consider when it about improving user experience.
6. Enhancing Website Awareness: A major facet of link building is creating the content that can pique your users’ interest. You can boost your website’s awareness by crafting content that is exclusive, informative andengaging. The most efficient method to create backlinks is via research and data.
Therefore, create reports, infographics and whitepapers to convey the data you gathered using interviews, polls, questionnaires and other survey methods. Guest blogging is another excellent way to spread your brand message. You may also consider modifying the way you present your content. For instance, transforming a simple text-based blog into an interactive video can be more effective in bringing in more likes and shares on social platforms.
The tactics discussed above are proven ways to restore or improve the DA of a website. While these might be time consuming, you will surely see a rise in your website’s DA and SERP rakings with continuous efforts.