News site Entrepreneur recently reported that a single authoritative link to your site can have as much of an effect as 500 metadata improvements. While this feels like a lot, such a backlink is a potent indicator that you have “domain authority” in your space and are a more credible source of information. However, what is domain authority, what does it do for your website, and why should you care about it?

In short, it impacts how well your website performs in search results. Keep reading to learn why this is vital in SEO success and how a high score can attract more organic traffic to your site. Discover how tracking and improving helps small-to-medium-sized businesses stay competitive in 2024. 

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain authority (DA) is a ranking score that a company called Moz developed in 2006 to offer website owners an easy way to see how effective their site was at SEO. DA predicts how likely a site is to rank on a search engine results page (SERP) and thus is a strong indicator of how much organic traffic you are likely to get through such sources.

What Is a Good Domain Authority?

Your DA will appear as a number between 1 and 100, with 100 being the best score a website can have. These numbers are also exponential, with it being much more challenging to get from 70 to 80 than from 60 to 70. 

According to DataForSEO, only four websites currently have a domain score of 100. So, if your score is still in the single digits, it may be time to contact someone who can help you increase your DA fast.

How Does a Domain Authority Checker Calculate DA?

Tools for calculating DA use several factors to determine what score they should give a website. The data pulled from a website to help work this out includes:

• Number of backlinks
• Backlink quality
• Website age
• Recency of site updates
• Site technical performance

Higher-quality backlinks from authoritative websites can significantly contribute to you having a higher DA score, boosting your visibility on SERPs.

What Boosts DA Scores?

In summary, the best way to grow your DA score is to offer high-quality content that is valuable enough to users that people view you as a stronger authority in your industry. For example:

Update your website: Leaving your website to languish shows that you are not investing in what you offer or discuss. As such, make minor updates now and then to keep it relevant, even if you do not have a significant update.

Use keywords naturally: While it is crucial to leverage keywords to ensure a crawler understands the purpose of every page, you should be careful not to overuse them. Instead, use keywords in natural-sounding sentences and ensure your content communicates its message clearly.

Be aware of your spam scores: While Google has admitted they do not prioritize how “spammy “ a site and its backlinks are, they have not set it aside entirely. 

On top of this, several non-Google tools leverage spam score data to define your site’s DA, and different DA reporters will use different algorithms to come to their final results. For this reason, an Ahrefs da score will often differ from a Moz DA score or a Semrush DA score.

Grow your page authority: This metric evaluates individual pages on your site and defines how each contributes to your overall domain authority score. It may benefit you to edit or remove any with lower DA results.

DA also tends to consider sites that run slowly to have low authority. Your website does not present itself in a professional light if users have difficulty accessing the information contained within.

What Does Domain Authority Mean for SEO?

Domain authority strongly indicates how likely your site and others are to rank highly on SERPs. As such, it can be a powerful method of comparing yourself to your competitors.

It is important to note that leveraging keywords to inform SERPs of your intent will not help on its own. You must also appear as an authority online to help you rank in competitive contexts, which is where having a high DA can come in. Sites with a higher DA will appear higher in rank and, all things being equal, often gain additional traffic for the same keywords.

What Domain Authority Means for Your Business

As domain authority offers a strong indicator of the state of your online presence and SEO effectiveness, it can be a good tool to highlight areas of improvement regarding your website’s construction. If your DA is low, you may want to work on some of the foundational aspects of your site, including:

• Creating useful content
• Sourcing high-quality backlinks
• Fixing technical issues
• Driving positive user reviews

For many small-to-medium-sized businesses, good DA can get them on equal footing with larger companies, especially in a local area.

How DA Impacts for Local SEO

A high domain authority can lead to more organic traffic, so if that occurs, you will not need to depend as much on paid advertising. All the steps you take to grow your domain authority will instead position you as a leader in your local area. You are then much more likely to attract and retain an audience organically, often allowing you to ride that wave forward into further success.

Building Credibility with a Domain Authority Expert

What is domain authority? Well, it’s a single number that offers an insight into the current state of your SEO efforts, giving you a clear view of how much your SEO efforts are paying off. You can, thus, leverage it to help you understand the results of any changes in your strategy.

Rose & Cactus has a long history of helping companies like yours improve their domain authority. We can work with you to ensure your site’s DA grows and attracts more organic traffic. Contact us to learn what this could mean for you, and start boosting your online authority today.

Laura Pulling Laura is a content strategist, SEO consultant, and lover of quiz nights. She works with global clients to turn great ideas into well-ranked, high-converting content.