This is a site ranking criteria created by the SEO software company Moz. In essence, it’s a score of 0-100 that determines the reputation of your website. The higher your score, the more likely your website will rank well and receive more web traffic. Your domain authority score is also a good way to monitor the quality of your SEO efforts.
Of course, this is just scratching the surface as to what domain authority is, its benefits, and how to improve it. Read on to uncover the secrets of this powerful site metric.
What is domain authority?
Your domain authority refers to the number and quality of relevant backlinks that link back to your website.
Why is this a useful site ranking factor? Because it’s an effective way to measure the trustworthiness of a website. The logic behind this is simple. If someone else thinks that your content is worthy enough to link to from their website, then they obviously find some value in it. If your content was low-quality, they’d have no reason to link to it, right?
Therefore, this makes it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to recommend your website to others, as they can see that people are already linking to it.
Is domain authority the same as page authority?
If you’ve already done some reading on this topic, you may have seen the term ‘page authority.’ And you have probably wondered if it means the same thing as ‘domain authority.’
To help clear the air: no, they’re not the same thing. Moz treats these as two very different ranking factors. Page authority refers to the ‘reputation’ of an individual page on a website, while domain authority refers to the ‘reputation’ of the entire domain or website as a whole.
Of course, it’s still incredibly useful to know the difference between the two, so at least you can say you learned something new!
How do you check your domain authority score?
Checking your domain authority score is quick and easy. Simply visit the Moz link explorer page and follow these steps:
- Enter the URL of the website or page you want link data for
- Create a free Moz account (or log in to your existing one) to access the Link Explorer
- Respond to the email that Moz sends you in order to verify your email address
- Get a comprehensive analysis of the URL you entered, and lots more information
Aside from taking just a moment of your time, checking your domain authority is free of charge.
Your report also comes with a lot more than just your domain authority score. You can discover link building opportunities, learn more about top-performing content, find broken links on your website and heaps more.
Keep in mind, though, there are a few downsides to using Moz’s Link Explorer service.
Downsides of Moz’s link explorer service
First off, trying to comprehend the contents of the report on your own can be exhausting. Unless you’re an expert in SEO and web design, the different numbers and terminology might not mean much to you. Therefore, you may be left wondering what to do with all this information.
Secondly, your domain authority is just one of many site ranking factors. On the other hand, a complete site audit goes far deeper. Here, you learn how to discover different sources of potential revenue, identify and repair various onsite/offsite issues diverting traffic, identify and capitalize on site traffic trends, and heaps more.
With this knowledge on your side, you can take the necessary steps to improve your site visibility and money-making potential.
Nicole Fitzpatrick
CEO & Author
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What’s a good domain authority score?
A ‘good’ domain authority score is not as clear-cut as you think. You may think that any score less than 100 is bad. But this isn’t necessarily the case. As a matter of fact, the quality of your domain authority score depends on how well your competitors score.
Let’s explain this a bit more clearly. Let’s say your website has a domain authority rank of 66. You’re probably looking at that number and thinking, ‘Well, that’s not very good, is it?’ That depends on whether your competitors have a higher or lower score than you.
If you were to do a competitor analysis, and you found out the highest score they have is 55 that means your website is doing well. Of course, if their score was higher, then you’d have some work to do. What does this mean for you? You need to look deeper than just your base score alone, and compare it to your competitors. In doing so, you’ll have a deeper understanding as to where you sit, and what you can do to improve things.
How do you improve your domain authority rank?
There are many ways you can improve the domain authority of your website. These tasks are relatively quick and easy to do and you don’t need any special coding knowledge and technical expertise.
Follow these simple steps to improve your website’s domain authority.
1. Add relevant internal links to your website
These are links that link one section of your website to another. They make it easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index your website. To add an inbound link, simply highlight the portion of text you wish to serve as the anchor text. Then, copy and paste the relevant URL you want the text to link to. Keep in mind, make sure your anchor text is relevant to the content of your inbound link.
2. Make your website mobile-friendly
This means optimising your website for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. To find out if your website is mobile-friendly, use this free mobile-friendly test from Google.
3. Make sure your website loads quickly
A slow-loading website is less likely to be frequented by high quality traffic. Make sure your website loads quickly, so that your users will be more likely to stick around and explore your website in full.
4. Build high-quality backlinks
This means using a variety of ways to encourage other websites to link back to your website. Do some guest blogging on a website that covers a similar field, niche, or industry to yours. Promote your website via your email list and social media followings. You can even directly contact authoritative websites and ask them to link to your website, given that you can come up with a compelling reason for them to do so.
Need to know more about backlinks?
Read "How to get backlinks that help your website rank" to learnmore
5. Reduce low-quality backlinks
These are links from websites that have been deemed untrustworthy by search engines. They could be spammy, fraudulent, or potentially even dangerous to visitors. For this reason, you don’t want websites like this linking to your own, as it negatively impacts your site ranking by association. You can use a tool like SEMrush to remove these links, or have an SEO expert take care of this for you.
At Apple Advertising, we make your business discoverable by building your online reputation through onsite and offsite optimisation. We also specialise in website design, Google Ads, and the creation of highly targeted landing pages to help you achieve maximum returns.
To request a FREE site audit and find out how to improve your website visibility, contact us today.
