What is Domain Authority And Do You Need It

What is Domain Authority, Anyway?

What is the Domain Authority of your website?

If your eyebrow shot up in questioning, then no worries. You’re right where you’re supposed to be. Domain Authority is an essential website metric that business owners can easily overlook. This week we’re going to break down Domain Authority and how to apply it to your website.

Domain Authority is one of the most important SEO metrics in determining the overall authority, or power, of your website. The basic Domain Authority (DA) metric can be measured using three key factors: Age, Popularity, and Size. Although, the creators of DA, Moz, calculate DA by considering dozens of other metrics, including number of total links and linking root domains.

DA works as a logarithmic scale from one to 100. The scale predicts how well your website will ranks on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). When a website has a higher score, it is more likely to be predicted to rank.

Technically, Domain Authority is calculated using a machine learning model to predict the best fit algorithm that correlates the DA calculation program’s link data with thousands of real search results. These real search results are used as the standard that the machine learning model bases its scale on.

How To Use Domain Authority

This DA score can be used to compare the site to other sites. It’s important to understand the DA score is a prediction of how well your site will rank, not how your site is ranking currently. So there shouldn’t be any pressure to have an insanely high DA score. Instead, a DA score should be used as a comparative metric--meaning you should compare your DA score to the scores of your direct competitors. Look at the DA scores of competitor sites, then use SEO strategies to ensure your DA score is always higher than your competitors.

Where To Find Domain Authority

The DA metric can be founding using SEO tools like Moz’s free tools at MozBar. You can also request that your SEO professionals add this metric to your monthly reports.

Domain Authority is NOT Page Authority

Domain authority predicts the ranking of your domains. Page authority ranks the strength of pages on your website. These are very different metrics.

How to Increase/Manipulate Domain Authority

The machine learning software makes it extremely difficult to influence your domain authority directly. The best way to influence your DA score for the better is to improve your overall SEO and link. DA scores will rank better in your favor if you specifically work on increasing the amount of links from other higher ranking and well-linked pages around the web.

Need assistance boosting your SEO? Call our Sonoma County SEO experts to see how we can help improve your overall SEO metrics, attract more customers, and produce more relevant content for your current customers.