How to Build Domain Authority for your Business Website

What is Domain Authority (DA)?

Domain authority, or DA, is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz, a leader in the SEO industry. Based on a variety of algorithms, DA scores range from 1 to 100; the higher the score means there is a greater likelihood of your site ranking. 

Where a good domain authority score would be closer to 100, a low authority domain score would be closer to 1. DA is a good indicator of the relevance of your website and the industry or subject matter people are searching for. Your brand awareness, or prestige of authors, quality of content on your website, and the competitive situation around your business, all factor into your DA. Since your DA score is based on numerous factors, it will often fluctuate.

Domain authority vs. page authority

While domain authority looks at the whole website, page authority focuses on specific pages. Page authority, or PA, is based on data from Moz’s web index and takes into account multiple factors, and uses an algorithm that correlates with rankings across SERPs that are then compared.

SERPs play a vital role in PA, though they do not directly impact your domain authority.

Why is Domain Authority Important to Your Business Website?

Creating a website and its content is a big task, and with the ever-changing marketplace, you don’t want your efforts to remain stagnant. Your domain authority score will help you understand where your business sits in the SERP results. It will give you an idea of how your website compares to your competitors and will allow you to make adjustments when your score is lower than you want it to be. 

Your DA score gives you an insight into the landscape of your industry in the digital space. In addition, the higher your score, the more likely you are to rank in Google results. While it doesn’t directly impact your position on the search results page, to have a high authority score, you will have to have proper SEO strategies in place, which will give you a higher ranking.

A higher DA score means your business will be seen by people looking for the products or services your business offers.

How to Calculate Domain Authority Score

Domain authority is scored on a scale of 1 to 100. Domain authority score between 40 and 50 is considered to be average, between 50 and 60 is considered good, and over 60 is considered excellent. 

There are many factors that Moz looks at when evaluating your website’s domain authority score. This includes root domains or inbound links, as well as the quality of content on your site, social media activity, and proper SEO practices. All of these things are taken into account when your DA score is calculated through a machine learning model.

Some Google ranking factors that impact your domain authority score include:

• Number of linking root domains to the page
• Number of root domains linking to the page using partial match anchor text
• Social signals from social media platforms, like Instagram’s likes and retweets.
• Number of subdomains that link to the page
• Number of quality websites linking to the page
• Number of links, both internal and external, a page has

Your domain authority score is updated every 3 to 4 weeks. As you take steps to increase this metric, it is important to have patience when checking your score.

How to Check Your Site’s Domain Authority

You can find out domain authority scores by downloading a third-party extension to your web browser. There are many SEO tools available to help you find out what your website’s domain authority score is; these include: 

• Moz
• Ahref’s
• SEMrush

Moz

Moz offers numerous tools to help you track your DA score. Their Link Explorer, MozBar, and Keyword Explorer will allow you to know your authority metric and offer ways to help you improve your score for your small business website.

MozBar is probably your best option. It’s free and will allow you to see your DA score as well as your competitors. With just a few clicks, the extension will be added to your browser.

Ahrefs

You can use the Website “Authority” Checker that Ahrefs offers. They use a domain rating that runs on a scale of 0 to 100. This tool uses various factors when giving you your domain rating, including how many unique domains link to the target website and the authority of those linking domains. 

SEMrush

SEMrush uses Authority Score to help you measure the impact of your website. Their Authority Score grades the overall quality of a website. The higher to score, the better chance your website has of ranking. They take the following factors into consideration: backlink data, referring domains, inbound and outbound links, backlinks, and total backlinks.

You can access this tool through their Backlink Analytics tool. This tool will allow you to analyze your domains ten times. After that, they require you to purchase a SEMRush subscription. 

How to Increase Domain Authority

White, there are no surefire ways to increase your Domain Authority, there are some things you can do that will go towards increasing your DA score.

Optimize technical SEO

Technical SEO is an important part of any website. It refers to the technical requirements that search engines prefer when crawling search results. There are many technical factors that give you a better chance of ranking, like:

• Install a Secure Socket Layer Certificate (SSL) 
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
• Fix any duplicate content issues
• Create a sitemap
• Add a structured data markup to your website
• Register your site with Google Search Console

Learn more about technical SEO here.

Create linkable content

Linkable content will allow you to increase your backlinking. Linkable content tends to be well-researched and often focuses on in-depth subject matters. The creators of this content tend to be seen as an authority on the subject matter and are industry leaders.

Linkable content also caters to a niche audience, so don’t be afraid to create content for a subset of your customers. It is also important that linkable content be timeless or evergreen, this will decrease the chances of someone linking to your content and finding a dead link.

Improve your internal linking infrastructure

Building your website authority takes time, but a good way to start your journey is to improve your internal infrastructure. When you publish new content on your website, search engines crawl that new piece of content. If you include links to previously published content, that content will be crawled as well. This will give your previous content a chance to be crawled when they were once inaccessible to search engines.

Internal linking will not only increase your DA score, but it will also help you develop a better content strategy. By using internal linking, you can organize your content into topic categories. 

Focus on high-quality content

As mentioned above, it is important that you create original and high-quality content. When scoring your domain authority, search engine crawlers will count it as a point against you if you have duplicate content on your site.

Working and honing your content strategy will help you create high-quality content that your customers and target audience will actually read. Go for content that is at least 1000 words long and well researched and thought out topics. Also, make sure you include keywords that have high search intent.

Focus on high-quality links

With high-quality content comes high-quality linking. When you are deciding on what links to use in your content, make sure the content you are linking to also follows the guidelines that you are using on your own site. High-quality links include linking to other relevant and authoritative pages on your site, as well as high-quality pages outside your domain.

Links that direct your audience to outside your website, or external links, should come from websites that have a high DA score. You can check any website’s domain authority with the tool you decided to use.

You don’t want to use low-quality links or spammy links. These links possess a low authority score and are not trustworthy. Using low-quality links can decrease your domain score and increase your spam score, meaning Google will be less likely to trust and therefore provide your site to others. For example, linking to an article that was out of date, content that is spammy, or to a product that is sold out, will definitely lower all page and domain authority scores. 

Due to the fact that external links have an effect on this domain authority metric, it is important that businesses create a link-building strategy, including a link profile. A link-building strategy and link profile will help you keep on top of the links associated with your business site. 

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

In 2015, Google introduced their “mobile-first’ crawling preference to search rankings. This means that when Google crawls your site, it is looking at the mobile version of your website first. These are five key factors used by Google when crawling your mobile-friendly pages: 

1. Viewport configurations: Your pages should be configured to adapt to different mobile devices – iPhone, Android, and tablet.
2. Font legibility: The text on the web page should be the correct size, and easy for your customers to read.
3. Compatible plugins: Be sure that any plugins you are using are mobile-friendly
4. Content to viewport: Your web pages should be able to be configured horizontally and vertically. Your audience shouldn’t have to view your website horizontally on their phone just see the content.
5. Size and proximity of links: Your call-to-action buttons and links should be an appropriate size, as well as touch-sensitive. If you’re buttons or links are too close to each other, they may be difficult to use on a touch screen.

Use social media marketing

Sharing your website and its pages on social media platforms will do wonders for your domain authority score. This is because social media likes, comments, and sharing are all taken into account when scoring your DA.

Social platform signals are a big ranking factor and if you don’t create content that your followers can engage with, your content will be just sitting on your site all by itself. It is a good idea to include sharing buttons directly on your site, so your readers can share them with their followers. Social media marketing is an important part of any small business marketing strategy.

Just like you need the right tools to help you build your domain authority and increase your ranking strength, your business needs quality software to build its finances. QuickBooks Online offers a whole slew of features to help your business with its payment processing, expense tracking, and more! Try it for free today.

This article was originally published on the Intuit QuickBooks blog here.