Anyone online entrepreneurs looking to convert audiences to sales understand that websites need to be seen amongst their competitors.
Your content should be optimised for search results, and how to increase your domain authority should be high on your priority list.
As one of Brisbane’s leading digital and creative agencies, we want to share our best tips to ensure your domain authority grows along with your customers.
So let’s dive into some of the best ways your business can improve its domain authority.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is usually referred to as DA and, in a nutshell, can help to predict how well you rank on search engines such as Google. A ranking metric designed primarily by Moz provides a score from 1 to 100. If your score is higher, you have a better chance of your site being seen by potential customers. Google has previously stated they do not use “domain authority” as a metric. However, they have said they use “sitewide signals”, which many SEO experts believe is a very similar mechanism. Higher domain authority scores won’t directly perform better on search engine results or SERPs. Instead, it’s the other way around. If your website ranks more highly on Google, your domain authority is likely to be higher or grow.
In short, domain authority is a measure of the authoritative standing of your domain.But it’s not a web-wide competition against all the other websites on the internet. Your “score” essentially ranks your website alongside your peers to establish where you are in the pecking order.
Domain authority vs page authority
Although domain and page authority are different metrics, both will show the relevance of your website in terms of your industry, and the scores reflect your domain alongside the competition. The chances are that if a competitor site hugely outranks yours, you will need to work on increasing your domain authority to keep up with the pack. Domain authority describes the strength of your whole domain, including sub-domains, whereas page ranking does what it says and ranks individual pages.
According to Moz, multiple factors contribute to higher domain authority. They include the total number of links and root domain links. Root domains are purchased from registrars and represent the specific unique location of your website.
In the simplest terms, your domain authority score can help establish your site's competitiveness within your particular niche. One of its chief benefits is that you can use this to help you target the best keywords. So let’s look at how to increase your domain authority. We will start at the beginning with a well-constructed website.
1. Optimise Your Website
Success online starts with ensuring your website is set up correctly. According to recent studies, over 19 million Australians are using mobile phones in 2022, so it stands to reason your site needs to be fully optimised for mobile to capture your audience effectively. Sites optimised for mobile will give your potential customers a better user experience. In turn, it will also help increase your site's chances of obtaining a robust, good-quality, organic backlink portfolio. Australian businesses with well-optimised and designed websites will likely have quicker page speeds. This contributes to search engines such as Google ranking your site as more preferable than competitors with slower page speeds. You can check your site speed with this Google PageSpeed tool.
2. Create High-Quality Linkable Content
So that search engines understand you are a leader in your industry, you need to build a vigorous index of high-quality backlinks. For the best chance of external links, it’s crucial to create super high-quality content, added regularly.
Other ways to make sure you attract the best quality links, which in turn can bolster your domain authority, are by:
- Improving the overall design of your website
- Creating rich media content such as videos and infographics
- Offering readers tutorials, how-to guides and other valuable resources
- Adding good helpful blog content regularly
3. Remove Broken or Bad-Quality Links
When considering how to increase your domain authority, backlink profiles can play a crucial role.Although it’s important to include links to increase domain authority, poor quality or broken links can damage your site's reputation with Google. If there’s a large discrepancy between your domain and page authority, it can be an indication of high spam content. Moz describes good quality links as coming from a highly reputable source, from an internally well-linked page and on a site with good domain authority. For example, a link from the New York Times, Forbes or Statista would be considered high-quality because the publisher is well known and respected – provided the link is relevant, with “Relevance” being one of Google’s highest-ranking factors - if not the highest.
Adding links from sites with high spam scores and other dubious sites, Moz would consider poor quality. By using the best web technicians, gathering backlink data will help you see if there are broken or poor-quality links affecting the domain authority of your site. These links can then be disavowed by Google. Moz, the original creators of domain authority, has recently improved how they discount bad links in a similar way to Google. It’s also worth noting that ‘poor quality links’ aren’t necessary from other sites with lower domain authority. With the complexity of how Moz rates domain authority, it will be seen as a good link providing it’s from a quality website and if it’s relevant to your audience.
4. Create a Robust Internal Linking Strategy
Although creating external backlinks should be a priority, you should spend time creating an excellent internal linking strategy. This will create good, helpful content that search engine crawlers look for. This is because it can help your audience find the answers to their questions, creating a more user-friendly experience. Google crawlers will more easily be able to index your site, which is an important factor in increasing domain authority. By using descriptive anchor text, you can add important internal links to give your readers additional resources from your existing content. You can also add internal links from relevant blog posts or other tutorials based on the subject your reader is investigating.
5. Promote Your Content
Although great content is important, ensuring you are sharing it is crucial. This will actively help to promote your product or service. You can also boost your content's visibility by promoting it via an email list.Also, layer up your online marketing efforts by posting regularly on the popular social media sites which are the most relevant for your industry. This could be Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or LinkedIn. Potential customers will have increased ways to convey and engage with you, boosting opportunities for good quality backlinks.
6. Have a Site Map
As we outlined earlier in the article, user-friendly sites have a greater chance of being ranked by Google, which can increase domain authority. A well-developed website structured correctly is crucial in any SEO strategy. This is because search engine crawlers will be more easily able to identify and index search results. To help with this process, creating a sitemap in WordPress is essential. This gives search engine crawlers all the information they need to navigate your site easily.
Wrapping It Up
Building domain authority is a crucial marketing metric for your website. It can contribute to an SEO strategy that converts visitors and drives sales. Although domain authority can lead to success, it’s not a hands-down guarantee. So you should always back up your domain authority pursuit with a robust SEO strategy.For businesses in Brisbane or across Australia, get in touch for more information on how our experts can help increase your domain authority.
