How to Increase Website Domain Authority

If you are playing in digital marketing or SEO, you are always in the race to get more traffic to your website. You might have read or heard somewhere over and over again that increasing traffic on your website depends on the DA - Domain Authority. It’s the only solution to gain users to your website and generate more traffic. But what’s Domain Authority? Is it really important? And, if it’s, then what are the steps to increase your website's domain authority?

Domain authority (DA) is a number or metric that shows the authority of your website. The higher your DA, the more likely you are to rank your website on the top pages of search engines and, hence, get more organic traffic.

According to Moz, Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that determines how well a website will rank on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Domain authority scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

In short, the higher your website’s DA is, the higher your rank on search engines like Google.

Domain Authority

Before indulging in domain authority, let’s share some facts and figures about DA. This insight will help you understand exactly how to improve your DA.

• Domain authority depends on various factors. The first and primary factor is how many backward links point to your website and how authoritative those websites are.
• It’s not easy to gain 100 DA for your website. And even if you cannot reach that number, it’s okay; there is no need to disappoint it. Sites like Facebook and Google have it.
• DA is challenging to influence directly. You simply cannot change your DA score like you can change your title or meta descriptions.

Why is Domain Authority Important, and How is it calculated?

Domain authority is an easy way to understand how Google ranks websites.

But let me tell you, Google’s ranking algorithms are a mystery. They are not easily understood, so we really have no idea how they decide which websites will rank based on which keywords. Google definitely shares best practices and ranking factors regarding this ranking but never reveals exactly how each website is ranked.

Domain authority is the final representation of the search results landscape and a key that lets you understand why certain websites rank higher than others. Hence, higher DA-ranking websites are well-versed and perform better than lower DA-ranking sites. As a matter of fact, there’s a direct correlation between high DA scores and higher rankings.

Now, if it’s asked how the DA of a website is calculated. Then, let’s tell you DA generally depends on the number of linking sites. But quality is even more critical. Links from high DA ranking websites pass much authority to the sites they link to.

High-DA websites have more incoming links and pass more authority exponentially when they link to other websites.

Let’s bifurcate the websites based on DA.

• Popular daily blogs have more than 80 DA
• Major media websites have more than 90 DA
• Only a handful of websites have a DA of 100 (Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Google)

Domain Authority is not only about search ranking factors. Websites with lower authority often outrank sites with higher authority. The reason behind this is that the ranking page may be more detailed and focused on the search phrase. To rank well in search engines, web pages need relevance in terms of authority.

How to Increase Domain Authority?

When you purchase a domain and register it, it takes time to build up authority. Many factors need to be considered, such as proper on-page SEO, making sure your website content is pure and high-quality, keeping your site mobile-friendly, and, obviously, site loading speed.

However, the biggest factor in increasing your DA is your link-building. In fact, you can consider DA rank as a measurement of your site's strengths or weaknesses.

Backlinks are considered the primary factor in Google. While there are many other factors as well, they are important in getting your site to rank and increasing search traffic.

1) Work On Your Off-Page SEO

Your link profile is the most important and considered factor. If your website has a strong and clean profile, it’s likely to have a higher DA score than websites with a less-than-good link profile.

Now, the question is, what’s a strong link profile?

Strong Link Profile

A website is called a strong link profile, when:

• It has incoming links from higher authority websites
• All the incoming links are relevant and from related websites
•  it doesn’t have bad links (low-quality links)
• The links are from various unique domains

How to Improve Your Link Profile?

Improving your link profile is known as Off-Page SEO. It’s a process of acquiring good links to your website that eventually improves your rankings.

To improve your link profile stronger, all you have to do is to improve your Domain authority and for that, you need to:

a) Remove Bad Links From Your Profile

The first thing you have to do is to remove bad links from your website. You can find out these toxic links or band links with the help of various tools like Moz Explorer or Semrush.

With a developer's help, you can remove the link or add the “nofollow tag” to devalue the link.

If this doesn’t work, you can use the Google disavow tool to remove the links from your profile.

If this does not work, you can use the Google disavow tool to remove the links from your profile.

b) Make Your Link Profile Stronger

To make your link profile stronger, you have to gain good, relevant links from other related websites. This is one of the most challenging parts of SEO.

Link building is a vast topic on its own. However, beginners find it a bit tedious and difficult to understand.

Well, here are two major methods for link building:

b.1) Natural Link Building

If your website has excellent content, it will attract links from other websites. This is known as ‘natural link building.’ In short, if someone likes your content and finds your website genuine and unique, they will read your articles. And I like it. Then, they will link to it from one of their articles.

To make this method successful, you must have genuine and link-worthy content on your website.

As we know, content is the king. If your content is useful, easy to read, and insightful, other webmasters will be willing to reference it in their articles.

However, this process takes time to gain enough readership.

b.2) Blogger Outreach

The second way to build good links is through blogger outreach. This means you have to contact other webmasters and let them know you exist.

This way, you increase the chances of linking to your website within their articles.

2) On-Page SEO Optimization

Optimizing your On-Page SEO is the next step to improve your domain authority.

On-page SEO means optimizing your page and content.


Here are some factors that you should consider while optimizing On-Page SEO.

• Optimized titles and Descriptions
• Relevant and proper usage of Headings (H1 and H2 tags) within your content
• Inject relevant keywords in your content (no keyword stuffing)
• URL structure and SEO-optimized permalinks
• Use optimized images, videos, and other media elements
• Add internal links to your content page

It’s important to know that the quality of the content is the primary factor that builds a good relationship with search engines for both on-page and off-page SEO.

According to a Google official, you must keep your content fresh and up-to-date for better SERPs.

3) Keep Your Website Mobile-Friendly

It’s a fact that most of the traffic you get on your website is coming from mobile devices. So, it’s mandatory to keep your website mobile-friendly. If you have not optimized your website yet, then you are probably out of the race.

It will not only hurt the search engine rankings, but you will also lose many visitors who get tired and do not find your website friendly when they operate from their mobile devices.

If you wish to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not, you can check it here on the Google Developers page. It will analyze your website and let you know how mobile-friendly your website is.

Google will show you an excellent report with recommendations on how to make your website mobile-ready.

4) Improve Your Page Speed

Page speed is one of the major and well-known ‘signals’ of the Google ranking algorithm. A website that loads faster has an additional advantage over a slower website.

Your page speed performance will not only improve your rankings and domain authority but also give users the best experience, which will eventually lead to more sales, leads, and revenue.

You can also check your website’s loading speed with the PageSpeed tool by Google Developers.

You can not simply achieve a good page speed in no time. Many technical factors need to be considered while increasing your website page speed. Hence, it can be tough for you if you are not a developer or not aware of technical knowledge.

Nevertheless, here we are giving some of the factors you should check.

• Remove unnecessary plugins
• Keep your WordPress and plugins updated to their latest versions 
• Optimize the size of images
• Use a streaming service like YouTube for videos
• Contact your hosting provider and ask for a report on your server’s performance.
• In case if you have large CSS files and many images, use CDN - Content Delivery Network
• Use a caching plugin.

5) Promote Your Content via Social Media

Since social signals play a major role in a big ranking factor, you must promote your social media content to generate traffic. Otherwise, your content will remain limited to websites only.

If you promote your content on your various social media platforms and create a healthy relationship with your followers or customers, that will help you create good engagement, resulting in generating more leads and traffic on your website.

For this, you should include social media buttons on your web pages so that users can share the content on their social media.

Wrapping Up

Don’t be obsessed with the number of domain authorities if you are working to improve it. Well, it’s just a number that shows how your website is performing and where you stand as compared to other competitors.

On the other hand, a low score of your DA doesn’t mean that your website is bad or will not perform well on Google. No matter how your DA is, there’s always room for improvement. So, always look at the bright side and the big picture, which is to build a website that, over time, will achieve good SERPs.

In short, to improve your website domain authority, your main focus should be quality content. Content marketing is the key that will open the door for your online business. In a a nutshell, content matters more than anything when it comes to improving your domain authority.

If you are following all of the given steps, then you will see a great impact on your DA over time. And if you are looking for a digital marketing company to help you out from this trouble, you should waste no time thinking about it. Connect with an experienced digital marketing company today and leverage digital marketing services to improve the website's domain authority.