When we talk about search engine optimisation, content marketing, social media, and digital marketing, you’ll probably hear the words “domain authority” thrown around quite a bit. But what exactly is domain authority, and why is it important for your business?

Domain authority (DA) is a metric that looks at your website’s “authority” – that is, how relevant or high quality it is – on a sitewide level. Page authority (PA) is an extension of this, which looks at the authority of each page individually.

These authority metrics play a big role in determining your site’s ranking strength (i.e. how high your website ranks on search engines).

Websites with a high domain authority will appear higher in search results, whereas those with a lower domain authority will appear further down in the results. As a result, websites with a high domain authority are likely to experience higher levels of organic traffic.

The order in which websites will rank on search engines will be determined by a variety of factors. Domain authority metric is just one of these factors. Another is how well your site has been optimised for SEO (link to SEO services page).

A website’s domain authority score is calculated based on several ranking factors, including:

• The number of other webpages that link to your webpage
• What your site’s link profile is like (i.e. the quality of the internal and external links to and from the webpage)
• The number of linking root domains (i.e. unique backlinks associated with the webpage)
• The trustworthiness of the websites linking back to your webpage
• How user friendly your webpage’s user experience is (in terms of navigation, structure, and design)

Domain scores are based off a 100-point scale. This means your website will be assigned a score from 0 – 100. The closer your website’s domain authority is to the 100 mark, the better.

Generally speaking, a DA score of above 80 is considered to be high DA. A DA score of 60 – 70 is considered to be very good, 50 – 60 good, and 40 – 50 average. However, 30 – 40 is considered to be below average, and below 30 poor.

If you’re unsure of your current domain authority, you can use a domain authority analysis tool, like this one by Moz (the company that developed domain authority scoring).

If your current domain authority score isn’t as good as you’d like it to be, there are lots of things you can do to improve it. These include:

• Building a strong link profile that encompasses a mix of inbound links, outbound links, and external links
• Ensuring you have a high number of unique linking root domains
• Acquiring quality backlinks from high authority websites, including by guest posting
• Acquiring backlinks from the same sources that your competitors are using
• Identifying and removing low quality or harmful backlinks from your site
• Implementing a content marketing strategy full of high quality, valuable content for other sites to link back to
• Improving your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Optimising your site’s navigation, structure, and design to make it as user friendly as possible
• Ensuring your site is mobile friendly
• Improving your loading speed
• Optimising your social media marketing strategy

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to increasing your site’s domain authority, we can help. At Tomedia, this is just one of the services we offer as part of our search engine optimisation suite of services. Click here to find out more information about how we can help you to increase your site’s domain authority.