Domain authority is one of the most important factors that determine your website’s ranking and business value. As it increases you will get more opportunities and income. So all website owners want their site’s DA to be higher than their competitors and strive for it.
Today, you will learn the best methods to increase domain authority of your website. We also list the top free DA checker tools to help you analyze domain and page authorities in this post.
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Table of Contents
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is an SEO metric developed by MOZ that analyzes various elements of your website and rates its ability to rank in the SERPs on a scale of 0 to 100.
Google ranking and Domain Authority (DA) are entirely different things. Your website’s search rankings are mainly influenced by the content quality and the number of qualitative backlinks it has. MOZ’s DA can do nothing on this.
Even though, MOZ has structured their ranking metric based on Google search algorithm and make changes frequently with time. Moreover, domain authority is the most reliable SEO score to analyze the quality and value of any website.
What is a Good Domain Authority Score?
Every website owner may want to know what a good domain authority score is. But it is difficult to say. Calculating on a scale from 0 to 100 means that the lowest score is bad, and the highest score is good.
MOZ considers over 40 factors when determining a website’s DA, such as the quality of backlinks pointing to it, traffic, and page speed. So there is no point in comparing your site with any leading player who has dominated the same industry for years. Naturally, their link profile will be much stronger than yours. They will also have a good budget for SEO and link building activities.
As a result, their domain authority will be above 70 or 80. But for relatively younger domains it will be between 20 and 40. It can only improve through systematic content creation, optimization, and link building.
So, it is best to compare your website to the small and medium scale businesses that are competing with you in the SERP rankings. Check what is their DA and monitor their backlinks to discover new link building opportunities.
According to SEO experts, MOZ DA scores can be classified as,
- 0-20 ? weak
- 20-40 ? Average
- 40-50 ? Good
- 50-60 ? Strong
- 60-80 ? Excellent
- 80-100 ? Best
It would be possible to increase the authority score from zero to 20 and from there to 50 in a short period of time. But if you want to go above that, it will take a lot of effort. That is only possible if you have compelling content that people want to link to, great organic traffic and authoritative backlinks.
Domain Authority vs Page Authority
Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are two metrics developed by MOZ that are intended to measure the authority of a website or web page. While they are related, they are not the same thing.
Domain authority refers to a website’s ability to rank in search results. The higher the score, the higher the chance your site will rank in SERPs.
At the same time, the Page Authority Score represents the ability of your individual pages to rank in search results. Not all pages on a domain have the same authority score. It will vary depending on the quality of the referring domains linked to those pages, on-page SEO and individual traffic.
How to Increase My Domain Authority?
You can’t build domain authority overnight. It requires continuous efforts. You need to create content that people love to read, optimize your pages properly, and above all, keep building high-quality backlinks.
These are the best methods to improve your domain authority score,
Getting backlinks from top-authority websites help you to raise both domain authority and page authority scores. You can do that by writing guest posts and building relationships with niche writers who write on major websites.
Check how your competitors are building backlinks and what are their referring domains through any competitor analysis tool like Semrush. It will give you good content ideas and help you generate massive search traffic, and get backlinks from top level domains. Learn this step-by-step guide to run a competitor analysis test and power up your link building campaigns using Semrush.
Broken link building is another proven method to strengthen your link profile. There will be any authoritative domain that you would like to have a link from. Visit that website and check if there is content related to any topic you have published earlier.
See which posts are linked from that page. Sometimes it can have broken links. Or your site may have better content than the linked content. If so, contact the site admin detailing the matter and ask them politely to replace their current link with yours. Wait for 3–4 days. If you don’t get a reply, send a reminder email. Repeat this step for 4–5 times.
2. Remove bad backlinks
In addition to building good backlinks, care must also be taken to remove spammy and backlinks. Audit your website regularly to check if any toxic backlinks are there. Otherwise, Google may penalize your site or even remove posts from search results.
Adapting the core fundamentals of the Google search algorithm, it will reflect in your DA score too. There are many backlink audit tools available to detect and remove such backlinks easily. They will monitor your backlinks and send a weekly report with the link details. Make sure that your link profile is clean and there are no toxic, malicious links.
If anything found, generate a Disavow file and upload it to Google Webmaster Tools to avoid risk. Learn how can you run a thorough backlink analysis and remove bad backlinks in this post.
3. Create compelling content
The main thing you need to do to increase domain authority is to create more and more engaging content. It will help your business reach more people and get more backlinks—naturally.
Discover less-competitive trending keywords in your niche and prepare the ultimate content around the topic. Monitor top pages ranking for the keyword to uncover related keyword phrases and link building opportunities. Share your content on social networks and communities to reach a wider audience.
Competitor analysis is another proven method to generate unlimited blog post ideas and dominate search engine rankings. Needless to say, it is the one-stop solution for content creation, traffic generation, and link building.
4. On-Page SEO
If you want to improve your domain authority, you need to make sure that your posts and pages are properly optimized for search engines.
Give special attention to the following,
- Title tags
- Meta description
- Internal linking
- Outbound links
- Image alt tags
- Right keywords
- No keyword stuffing
- No links to spammy websites
Address the above-mentioned elements and rules, to ensure that your pages are SEO-friendly. Optimize your content for relevant, trending keywords, without stuffing them. It helps you to rank for maximum keywords and earn more clicks from search queries.
Internal linking is a great strategy to divert visitors to other pages in your site and reduce bounce rate. Acting like a spider web, it also strengthens your link database and increases the chances of the page being crawled.
Outbound linking is another part where you should pay attention to. Linking to top-authority domains in your niche whenever necessary. According to recent studies, it helps search engines better understand your website category and boost SERP positions.
If you don’t follow recommended SEO practices, it will diminish your domain authority scores on MOZ, Semrush, and Ahrefs. Run an SEO audit to find and fix complex SEO issues on your site.
5. Increase website speed
With the arrival of Core Web Vitals, your page speed is now more important than ever. Depending on the hosting, theme, plugins, and media used, your pages may take longer to load. As we know, it affects your visitors’ experience and decrease rankings.
Find how your website is loading, through a page speed test tool like GTmetrix. If you are facing a slow speed issue, consider taking the following steps,
- Shift to a fast web host
- Install a light-weight theme like Astra or GeneratePress
- Reduce the number of plugins
- Install a caching plugin like WP Rocket
A fast and mobile-friendly website can rank higher in search engine result pages. Mobile friendliness has become a crucial factor to enhance your organic search presence and boost domain authority score. Take these key steps to increase your website speed and serve content faster to your visitors.
Final Thoughts
Achieving high domain authority is every website owner’s dream. There are no shortcuts to it.
Keep creating content that people want to read and link to. Getting backlinks from top authority domains will quickly improve your traffic and rankings. Being more active on social media can help you connect with expert writers and influencers. Email outreach can also help you reach more people and expand your database of inbound links.
Along with the above, you also need to make sure that your website is search engine friendly. Doing so will undoubtedly increase your domain authority and search rankings.
Best Domain Authority Checker Tools
These are the best free tools to check domain authority of any website,
1. MOZ
MOZ’s free domain SEO analysis tool allows you to check domain authority of a site in 1-click. Enter a website URL to know its domain authority, ranking keywords, and number of referring domains.
Scroll down to view the list of top ranking keywords, number of estimated clicks on them, top referring domains, keyword ranking distributions, and more. To retrieve detailed reports, you should upgrade the subscription level and activate a free 30-days MOZ Pro trial.
2. Website SEO Checker
Website SEO Checker is a free, bulk DA checker. It allows you to check domain authority of multiple websites in 1-click. Enter your homepage URLs one per line, fulfill CAPTCHA field, and tap the Check button.
This tool will tell you domain authority and page authority of your domains with more details such as total backlinks, quality backlinks, MOZ Trust Score, domain age, etc.
3. Ahrefs
If you want to check Domain Rating (DR) of a website, visit Ahrefs Website Authority Checker. Enter URL, to know its Domain Rating, total backlinks, and number of referring domains.
Unfortunately, you can’t retrieve the list of backlinks and referring domains using this free tool. For that, a premium subscription is required. Website owners can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools freely to monitor their site’s backlinks and SEO performance.
4. Small SEO Tools
Small SEO Tools is another place to check MOZ DA and PA in bulk. It accepts up to 10 URLs at a time to collect SEO metrics.
This website hosts over 100 tools to retrieve information relating to web hosting, WordPress theme, Domain Rating, SEO score, and much more.
5. Semrush
To check Semrush Authority Score (AS), visit Semrush and open Domain Overview tool. Enter a website address and Semrush will show its Authority Score, and other SEO data in a moment.
Scroll-down to get full details of your target domain including backlinks, organic keywords, competitors, paid keywords, and others.