Tips for Boosting Your Domain Authority
To improve your ranking on search engines, you need to monitor and improve your domain authority metric. Your domain authority rating depends on your competition; the businesses that rank for the exact keywords as you or are trying to rank for the keywords you're targeting. For example, if you are in the real estate industry dealing with residential housing, your domain authority rate will depend on how your competitors in residential housing are faring. Your website will be ranked on a scale of one to 100.
When it comes to domain ratings, there isn't a specific number that defines a “good” rating. It all depends on how players of the same industry are performing. Assuming that your competitors' DA rate ranges between 40 and 50, having yours between 50 and 60 makes a reasonable domain rate. Here are tips for boosting your domain authority.
1. Conduct a link audit
A link audit is a process of analyzing and ensuring that your website backlinks are valid and that you have no bad links. Using SEO authority tools, measure your website's domain authority by looking at the quality and quantity of your backlinks and content. If you have several domains to audit at once, try BulkDAcheck to check their domain authority ratings.
You'll get your current domain score from the audit process to know how you're faring against the competition. This will help you know the strategies to employ to improve your domain authority. Additionally, it helps you know the number of wrong links to get rid of and the credible links your site has.
2. Choose a domain name that you can keep
If you choose a domain name relevant to your business, there will be no need to change it. This is because old domain names rank higher than new ones due to their keyword history and authority, web traffic history, and the legitimacy and credibility your content has built over time. If your current domain is doing well, changing it will take you to ground zero since building a new domain will take longer to rank. Therefore, it's advisable to maintain your URLs and create new relevant domains for new businesses you'd like to start.
3. Create quality clickable content
To create quality content, focus on industry-relevant keywords as they determine how high your site will rank. High-quality content gets you a significant readership that drives more traffic to your site. Consistently publishing quality content will attract authoritative sites to link to your website, leading to improved domain scores.
4. Use SEO best practices
When you follow SEO techniques, your rankings improve and strengthen your domain score. Optimizing your on-page content helps your site rank higher. Some of the optimized elements include title and meta description, URL and permalinks, images and their alt tags, keywords, and internal and external links. These elements also boost user experience and increase site visibility.
Additionally, work on your off-page SEO by acquiring high-quality links from domains with higher domain authority than yours. To attract more inbound links to your site, naturally link your content to valuable sources, focus on broken link-building for sites with high domain authority. You may also consider blogger outreach, where you guest post on other websites in the same niche as you.
5. Remove bad links
Link cleanup is a good practice that allows you to get rid of irrelevant links, poorly rated backlinks, broken links, and any links that seem to be spam to avoid hurting your domain score. Once you're done with the link cleanup, your website is left with credible and authoritative links that improve your domain authority rating.
6. Work on your internal links
To improve your internal linking, create many pages of quality content to enable you to link one page to another. This ensures that leads stay engaged longer on your site, making it easy for search engines to index your website. Creating lots of content ensures that you have enough pages to link to. In addition, relevantly link your content to ensure flow for a good user experience.
7. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly
Considering how much internet time people spend on their mobile devices, ensuring mobile-friendliness for your website is vital for SERP ranking. A responsive site makes it easy for people to find you, read, and share your content to attract backlinks, thus improving domain scores.
To make your site mobile-friendly, use a responsive web design for audience and prospects to easily reach from any device, then make your menu and call to action (CTA) buttons within reach to enhance mobile user experience. Additionally, measure and improve your site's load time so your leads don't leave your site. A mobile-friendly website helps you rank high on search engines leading to more traffic, shares, and links that improve your domain score.
Endnote
Even though domain authority doesn't directly affect SEO rankings, it helps you predict how your site will rank in search engine results. These tips will guide you on your journey towards improving your domain authority.