Everyone is talking about website Domain Authority (DA) these days, but what exactly is it? And how much DA do you need to rank well on Google?

These are logical questions that almost every business owner has.

So, what exactly is a Domain Authority (DA)?

A website’s Domain Authority is a numerical representation of a website’s popularity and importance. It is one of many ranking factors used by search engines to determine where a website should rank in the search engine results. Therefore, increasing your domain authority will increase the trust and credibility of your website.

In this blog, we will walk you through 7 practical steps you can follow to increase your website’s domain authority and start dominating the online market.

7 Steps to Improve Your Website’s Domain Authority

Trying to increase your website’s domain authority can be a daunting and confusing task. In fact, it can feel like shooting in the dark.

After working on different strategies to improve DA over the years, we’ve boiled them down to 7 practical steps that work. If your goal is to increase the domain authority of your website, these are some things you should do-

Step 1: Analyze Your Current DA

You can easily find your current DA using an online tool, like Moz Domain Authority Checker.

The higher your domain authority, the more likely you will appear on page one of the search results for any given keyword. It’s not an exact science – there’s no magic strategy for SEO – but it does give you an idea of how competitive the specific keywords are and whether you’re in the right ballpark or not.

Armed with your current DA score (and maybe some of your competitors), you should have a good measure of expected DA for your website.

The next step is to get an idea of how your website is ranking now. You can use Google Analytics to note your current metrics and your site strength in terms of the search engine rankings along with your backlink profile.

Your backlink profile comprises all the sites that are linked to you, and Google looks at this when deciding how relevant your site is for any given keyword. Therefore, the more quality sites linked to your site, the more likely you will rank well for competitive keywords.

You can use the Moz Link Explorer tool that shows you all of the backlinks pointing to your site. From here, you can get the best websites for getting more links.

The domains with link authority are usually related to your website’s niche. For example, if you’re a dog breeder, you should try & get links from websites related to dog breeding, such as dog shows and forums.

The other way to get quality links is by participating in blog comments on blogs related to your niche. You can also create a guest post on another site in relation to yours and use it as an opportunity to link back to one of your posts or pages on your own website. This process can be very effective in helping boost the domain authority.

Step 4: Improve Your On-Page Elements

On-page optimization improves the user experience, which helps increase your site’s domain authority. It also makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your site, which increases your domain authority.

This on-page optimization gives importance to the title tags, meta tags, alt tags, heading tags, image tags, site structure, site design, and many more. In addition, it ensures that your website is coded correctly and quickly loaded to the users.

You can improve your on-page SEO by:

  • Creating quality content that’s relevant to your audience & optimized with keywords
  • Including the relevant keywords in your title tag, headings, and subheadings
  • By including primary keywords in the first 100 words of the text and aiming for LSI keywords
  • Creating a simple, user-friendly website design that’s easy to navigate
  • Removing heavy elements from your website that can deter your loading speed

Step 5: Optimize Your Linking Structure

Many website owners emphasize external linking and often forget about the internal linking structure.

Creating quality content on the topic you’re trying to rank for allows you to link naturally to related pages on your site (e.g., linking inside of a blog to other blogs on your site relating to different topics).

And you also need to periodically analyze websites linking back to yours and remove links from bad sources as well as broken internal links.

It will improve your internal linking structure, strengthen your individual page’s authority and help with SEO.

Step 6: Structure Your Website in a Logical Manner

It doesn’t matter how much content you have if visitors can’t find or navigate your pages easily. A good way to ensure that people can find the information they’re looking for on your site is by ensuring that each page has been given a relevant title tag and every internal link leads to a relevant page.

You can work with a website developer to create a sitemap that’s easier to navigate.

Step 7: Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

If your website is not mobile-friendly, it could have a huge impact on your domain authority as well as your rankings.

In fact, Google has said in the past that it prioritizes sites that are created with a mobile-first approach, so it’s vital to ensure your website is mobile-friendly.

Having a mobile-friendly site means a responsive design with light elements that quickly loads and can adapt to the small size of a mobile screen.

Our Conclusion

Improving your site’s domain authority will improve its SEO potential and ensure that your page comes up higher in online search results. Is that worth a bit of time and effort? Definitely!

So follow these steps to check your current DA and slowly but surely climb up the ladder with better search engine rankings.