What Is Domain Authority and Why Is It Important for Your Website

When visiting a website, you want to be sure of the quality of the content offered. But how do you find out that the site is effective, it can be trusted, and the information posted on it will be useful to the user? The choice of the site by the user is primarily determined by its place in the search engine rankings. An essential factor that defines the place of the site is the authority of the domain.

So, what is domain authority, and why is it important? In this article, we will provide answers to these two questions, as well as describe how to calculate domain authority and explain how you can improve it.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority (DA) is a numerical value from 0 to 100 that reflects the reputation and authority of a site. The term was invented by consultants at Moz, an SEO consulting company, to assess the relevance and effectiveness of a website in search engine rankings. Basically, DA provides a general idea of a website’s authority.

Why is it important?

The higher the DA value, the more likely the site will rank highly in the search engine. The authority score is based on factors that show that a site has a certain level of quality. Such factors are content quality, number of inbound links, domain age, popularity, etc. Domains with a history are almost always ranked higher, except when a site that has already become popular is transferred to a new domain.

In addition, DA can also be used to evaluate the competitive landscape. If you are trying to decide which keywords to use in your campaign, competitors’ DA can help you determine how difficult it will be to overcome their search engine rankings.

Yet, you should remember that algorithms of search engines like Google do not operate on the concept of domain authority. Nevertheless, high values indicate the high quality of the site and the correct selection of keywords and directly correlate with the ranking.

How is Domain Authority Calculated?

Now you know why domain authority is important, but you still need to figure out how it’s calculated. Moz’s proprietary search machine learning algorithm evaluates the quality of any website based on a variety of factors. Specifically, the score is derived by considering a number of variables, including connecting root domains and a total number of links. Without diving into technical details, it determines how search results rank your site and then compares it to backlinks and a host of other factors.

Ahrefs external site optimization analysis service uses its own method of calculating domain authority based on the number of backlinks of a site compared to other sites, also using a 100-point scale. According to it, domain rating depends not only on the number of pages that link to your site, but also on the number of sites linking to those pages. Backlinks from highly ranked sites are preferred because they have more “weight” for search engines.

We can highlight the following factors that most affect domain authority:

• The quality of the link profile. The more authoritative sites refer to the resource, the higher will be its position in the rankings.
• The authority of individual pages. The authority score of a website consists of the authority of individual pages, which should also be taken into account.
• Social Reactions. User activity, such as likes and comments, also positively affects the position in the output.
• Quality of content. To be high in the rankings, you need unique and useful content.
• The general state of the site. Compliance of the resource with modern UI/UX standards and niche specifics affects the rankings.

What’s a Good Domain Rating?

We’ve dealt with the meaning of domain authority and how it’s calculated. However, what is a good domain authority? In general, the indicators can be divided as follows:

• Up to 30 — low.
• From 30 to 40 — below average.
• 40 to 50 — average.
• 50 to 60 — good.
• 60 to 70 — very good.
• Above 80 — excellent.

However, these indicators are quite relative, and even slight fluctuation can determine your position in search engines. If your competitors have a domain authority of 85, and you have 80, their sites are more likely to be higher in the search engine’s output.

How Can I Find My Website’s Domain Rating?

There are several ways how to check the domain authority of a website:

• One of the easiest and fastest ways is to use a free tool from Moz — MozBar. This is a browser extension that allows you to see the DA and other site metrics on search engine pages.

• Another way how to check domain authority is to use the paid version of a previous tool – Moz Link Explorer. With it, you can get more detailed information about DA as well as other site metrics such as the number of links, analyze anchor texts, and more.

• Alternatively, you can use the SERP analysis component of Keyword Explorer. With its help, you can determine the DA of any website.

• One more way how to check the domain authority of a website is Ahrefs external site optimization analysis service. It has a slightly different scoring system, but it will also help you get an idea of domain authority.

How to Build Your Domain Authority: 6 Useful Tips

So, you’ve learned about the importance of domain authority as well as how to check it and got a rather demotivating result. What should you do? In this case, do not be discouraged, and just take a set of measures to improve the authority. Most likely, this process will take you two or three months, but you will start to get organic traffic, which is the most effective way to increase your profitability. Among the measures to improve domain authority are:

• If you are at the very beginning of your journey, take care of creating a website and choosing a domain name that is simple, memorable, and in tune with your line of work. You can buy an old domain so as not to lose time in the “sandbox” — the so-called Google filter, which does not allow new sites to go to high places in the results of the output.
• Keep an eye on the quality of the content you publish and work on increasing expertise in your niche. If the information on a page on your site is valuable and relevant, it will be referenced by users and other publications.
• Work with third-party resources. The higher the authority of the pages that link to it, the higher the authority of your domain as well. A quality backlink works like an expert recommending another expert. If the expert’s opinion is trusted, the value of the recommended information increases. Also, you may use paid resources with high authority that will post your content with a link back to your site.
• Your site should be technically optimized so as not to annoy your visitors with long loading and errors. This way, not only will you increase your domain authority ranking, but you will also improve user experience.
• Use internal linking. This will increase the user’s time on the site and help to evenly distribute the link mass between the pages of the site.
• Constantly analyze your website for potential improvements. Instruments like Moz Link Explorer or Ahrefs can help you track your progress and see whether you’re moving in the right direction.

Conclusion

Now you know how important domain authority is. High domain authority is a critical metric to consider when evaluating the quality and competitive landscape of a website. With proper tools, you can easily find out the DA of competitors’ sites and use this information for your marketing campaigns.

Also, if you are not satisfied with the result you get, you can try to improve it with your own efforts, but it is better to turn to professionals for website promotion. Do not forget that DA is just one of the factors that affect the site’s ranking. Others include content, usability, page load speed, and much more. If you want to significantly improve your website’s position in rankings, the professionals at Livepage can help you do just that.

Consider Livepage as Your Trusted Partner

Improving domain authority and other essential factors impacting website promotion is best entrusted to professionals. Turning to Livepage, you will get a well-coordinated team of specialists and local SEO experts whose main task is to achieve visible results.

Being also an SEO audit services company, and for 12 years of work in the niche of online resources promotion, we have accumulated more than 100 successful cases in our portfolio and attracted 10+ million audience to the sites of our clients. Contact us now, and our experts will define the goals of your project, study competitors, choose the best strategy to achieve success, and make your business more profitable in the shortest possible time. Be sure to check out our case studies. There, we detail how we’ve increased domain authority, leads flow, and other crucial metrics for our clients.