Over the last few years, the internet has become a highly competitive battleground for traffic and customers. And achieving higher scores in various metrics is now absolutely necessary if you want to succeed. Normally, if you want your potential customers to find you, first you have to rank higher to become visible. But it becomes increasingly difficult since Google uses dozens of factors when evaluating a website. Since the priority is kept a secret, you will need alternative means to measure your website’s score. And this is where the Domain Authority helps. There are several ways to achieve higher authority for your domain, and knowing them can help your or your clients’ website to rank higher.
Achieve higher authority for your domain for better ranking
Everyone managing a website knows that SEO is one of the primary digital marketing concerns. With good SEO, a website will usually push its way up to the first page on search results. But, it takes time, knowledge, and serious dedication to achieve it. Especially for fresh websites. Competing with other well-established and trusted websites requires an experienced professional SEO team such as the one at Link Department. They will use the Domain Authority (DA) to evaluate the current state and the potential, which is usually based on multiple factors. The combination of these factors, like link profile, gives you an insight into how well your website might perform. And eventually what steps to take to improve its ranking further.
What exactly is the domain authority?
Domain authority is a score between 0 and 100 that shows the potential of your website for ranking. Basically, it’s developed by Moz to evaluate the implementation of some of the most important factors Google finds necessary for high rankings. In general, some of the crucial factors are:
- The number and quality of backlinks
- Internal link structure
- Content quality
- Social signals
- Website overall performance
- User-experience
Whether you are a website owner or SEO company that works with clients, knowing how to improve Domain Authority is absolutely necessary.
How to increase authority for your domain
Focus on creating a strong link profile
Websites with a strong and clean link profile have higher Domain Authority. This means agencies and website owners should focus their efforts on building a quality link profile. Especially since it’s also one of the most important signals for Google. In particular, if you acquire plenty of quality backlinks from authoritative websites, it shows the website is reliable and trustworthy.
So, to improve your Domain Authority, here is what you need:
Obtain Natural Links
To get high-quality links, you need to build quality content. Great and relevant content on a website is the best way to naturally obtain valuable backlinks. This is also something Google highly recommends and appreciate when evaluating websites. However, this process can take a lot of time if you don’t have backlink experts to assist you. On the other side, naturally earned links are probably the most valuable links in your link profile.
Collect Unlinked Mentions
Unless you are building a brand name from the start, chances are there are mentions of that brand on the internet. If you didn’t already, you should try to link them back to your website. Fortunately, tools like SEMrush can help you audit your website and discover unlinked mentions. However, your primary target should be the mentions in places with high authority. The reason is that they pass a portion of authority to you.
Use Broken Link building method
Broken link building is a very effective strategy to get links and improve Domain Authority and ranking. By using one of the SEO tools you can check if some of the sites with high DA have broken links. If yes, try to reach them and offer quality content they can link back to. Generally speaking, the effectiveness of this strategy lies in the benefit it provides to both you and other websites.
Reach out to bloggers
Try to reach out to bloggers that are in connection with your niche. You have two options here:
- you can offer the guest post in exchange for a backlink
- or you can ask them to review your service or product
In essence, these types of links are natural links that can show some great results and can be obtained quite fast.
Improve your internal linking
Good internal linking structure helps you in many ways. First, it makes the job easy for search engines to crawl your website. Second, it increases the average time users spend on the website you are optimizing. Finally, the internal link structure spreads the link juice and authority between your pages.
Deal with bad links
There is a number of links that have small to no value to your website. In addition, links from suspicious places can earn you a penalty from Google. That’s why you need to audit your website and deal with them so they don’t spoil your DA. Commonly known as toxic links, they have to be removed from your website so they don’t affect your ranking position as well. As noted above, you need a clean link profile. If you can’t remove links to your website, you can disavow them through Google.
Other methods to achieve higher authority for your domain
Improve on-page SEO
On-page optimization is necessary for good ranking and increasing your Domain Authority. It’s basically a process of optimizing various technical elements on your website pages. Here is what it generally includes:
- Keyword optimization
- Proper use of headings
- Permalink structure
- Meta description
- Image optimization
Make it mobile-friendly
Today, this is no more an option. It’s absolutely necessary to optimize your websites for mobile users. Since the number of mobile users surpasses desktop users by far, mobile-friendly and responsive site is a standard today. Even Google places great value on this factor.
In the end, don’t forget to audit and optimize websites regularly. Maintaining a quality link profile along with a great user experience can significantly help you achieve higher authority for your domain. Even though it can be frustrating at times, increasing your website DA requires patience and dedication. But, it definitely pays off when the results start to show.