Written by: Jaime Flores

Digital Marketing Specialist

With the intense rise in websites and online competition, businesses are looking for any competitive edge they can get to be above their rivals and dominate their industry. One of those ways is by increasing their domain authority. Increasing their domain authority, or web address authority, gives the potential benefit of appearing higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Its been proven time and time again that those who are near the top, especially in the top three, are the ones people tend to click on the most – thus getting the business!

In this article, we’ll show you and explain the most effective tactics to help improve your domain authority and start on the right path towards more clicks and increased business.

Let’s begin by understanding what exactly is Domain Authority and how its determined.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority or DA is a term used for determining how well your web address ranks in search engines usually determined by a score between 0 – 100. The higher the DA score, the better the chance your website will grow towards the top in online searches.

The first step would be to have or obtain a domain name. If you don’t have one start by searching for available domains that is relevant to your business, type of work and website. Look at our site, iSeedDigital as an example. We are mainly focused on digital marketing which is why we chose to have ‘Digital’ in our domain.

Your domain should be easy to remember so reoccurring and potential new customers won’t have a hard time finding you online or returning to your site because of a lengthy or irrelevant name.

How is Domain Authority Calculated?

Domain authority is all based on how well algorithms can determine how trustworthy your website is and how well others trust you as well.

The information these algorithms used by Google, Bing, Yahoo! and others helps determine how well your web address is trusted and relied upon in order to give you a score.

Your score is determined by the signals and clues provided by your online reputation such as:

How old your domain is

Your web address age plays a significant role in how well it scores, a recently purchased domain will have an initial score of zero vs on that’s been registered for years.

Your brand’s search volume

How well do people know your company name? If people are searching for your brand specifically and in quantity, this will help boost your DA

Number or links that point to your website, i.e Backlinks

The number of sites that trust in your websites content and feel safe to link to you helps in growing your web address DA. Its always best to strive for quality over quantity.

The quality of those backlinks

As mentioned before, reputable and relevant websites pointing to you will help boost your score. Irrelevant and those lower in DA scores will not help your cause.

Your websites internal link structure

Do your web pages currently communicate well with each other by interlinking together?

Quality of your websites content

Is your content unique and relays the right message and answers to potential visitors?

Social media signals

Are you sharing your content on social media, and if so, are people interested and willing to share it with friends?
Do you have quality reviews on Facebook? These will help determine your score.

Website code quality and performance

Is your site designed properly using quality and SEO-Friendly software such as WordPress and not code-heavy site builder like Wix or Squarespace?

On-Site SEO structure

Is your website’s content written using targeted keywords related to your business? Also is your site using SEO boosting abilities such as schema latest web technologies?

How to Check your Domain Authority?

There are many online tools, free and paid, that help you determine your web address authority score. We like to use Ahrefs as its really simple. Simple enter your domain in the search box, answer the reCaptcha, and voila! Your domain score is revealed.

Another great option is Ubbersuggest, both are limited to the amount of information you can see but they are free.

How To Improve Domain Authority

If you haven’t noticed by now, SEO plays a big roll in determining a sites domain authority. To start off, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at how to improve your SEO as well as other effective areas we use to improve a domain’s ratings and also improve user experience – after all the ultimate goal is to get humans to buy from us not robots right.

Tip #1: Improve Your Internal SEO

Here we are referring to your websites On-Page SEO, meaning, how well optimized are your websites pages. If your websites content is from the Flintstones age, we highly recommend updating it in a way that is relevant to your business, is targeted to your audience, and optimized for specific keywords.

Also worth reading: How Do I Improve My SEO & Why It Matters?

How to improve On-Site SEO

On-Site SEO refers to optimization strategies within your website’s code, content, and server configurations to improve search engine rankings and user experience.

Domain Authority highly depends on a well-written and well-structured website that provides solutions and answers with an excellent user experience.

Ensure your website is 100% Responsive on mobile, tablet & desktop

Make your website load fast by shrinking CSS and Javascript

Optimize your headlines and meta descriptions using relevant keywords

Optimize your images – size, name, alt description, and GeoTag them if your local business

Add structured data such as schema when possible

Use bullets lists, bold, italics and proper H tags to highlight your content

Optimize your URLs by adding your keyword to the link address

Check your internal links – add them if you don’t have any and fix any broken links

Tip #2: Improve Your External SEO

External or Off-Site SEO refers to optimization done outside of your website such as your backlinks, online directories, social media links and more. When you scan your domain for its DA, your often given the number of links that are linking back to your site.

These external links are part of your link profile and its important to know who’s linking back to your because you’ll want higher authority and related sites only.

How to improve Off-Site SEO

Off-Site SEO involves building your link websites link profile by engaging with other websites in your niche and getting quality links back to your website. This is where having a blog is very important and worthwhile.

What makes a strong link profile? A good amount of incoming authoritative websites that are related to your website or industry.

Share and promote your articles or blog posts on social media

Guest post for a high DA website in your industry and remember to mention (link) you website

Find business directories and create a listing or profile with your business info

Create or share infographics, photos, video on social media

Search for forums in your industry and engage in conversations

Periodically check & update your Google My Business & Bing Places listings for accuracy and implement new strategies

These items can take time and be overwhelming, which is why many choose to hire an SEO expert and save themselves the headaches.

Tip #3: Become An Authority Within Your Niche

Creating interesting and engaging content such as blogs or articles not only increases your domain authority but also SEO scores, brand awareness, number of leads, and brand awareness.

Aim for 1,000 or more words when writing your content. Be sure to research, structure and type in a way that’s natural and is easy to understand. When writing content, you’re not limited to just blogs, use these tips for your web pages, product pages and landing pages. If you are a local businesses, you should have SEO optimized city pages.

Also worth reading: Are Websites Worth the Investment?

Tips for creating engaging content

Write your content tailored to your business and niche

Don’t stuff your keyword(s) in your writing, make it sound natural – write for humans not robots.

Research your chosen keywords first, make sure people are Googling for them

Write in phases, have an outline

Provide stats, facts and make sure to cite your sources so you appear as a professional

Use images, videos, charts or anything visual that will make explaining your topic easier and informative

Boosting your reputation as an authoritative brand strengthens your brand, increase traffic, gains the ability to number of external links you earn from other websites.

Remember to stay on top of outdated articles or blog posts. Update any old posts with new information, keep the quality high!

Tip #4: Improve Your Technical SEO

Technical SEO optimization is when modifications are done either the website code itself or web server side to help improve the performance of search engines ability to crawl and index your site more efficiently.

Below is our technical SEO checklist to ensure your benefiting the most out of your DA goals.

Technical SEO To-Do’s

After registering, submit your sitemaps to both Google & Bing

Have SSL Certificate installed on your website

Begin adding structured Schema

Tip #5: Improve Website Speed

Websites that can load in under 3 seconds tend to have the best engagement rates, Why? Nobody likes staring that that endless spinning loading circle.

You can test your website’s loading speeds at GTmetrix. This is a really great tool because it provides feedback on things you can do to improve your site speed, not just telling you what your load time is.

Things that can affect your web speed is large image files, too much javascript, too many font styles, server redirects, web page size and many more. Often times delaying some of these tasks and prioritizing the important ones will help boost your site speed and domain authority.

Tips to improve your website loading speed:

Maintain and keep your site updated – update themes, plugins, and use the latest & secure PHP version on your web server

Reduce the size of your sites images – use programs that help shrink images down without sacrificing quality too much.

Enable caching resources – this will help store a preview of your site into your server which means it will have to work with less data to retrieve your site

Minify CSS & Javascript – over time these files can get big. Simplify them by reducing unnecessary characters and spaces to improve site scan and load times

Avoid URL redirects – having too many of these means your domain will be bouncing back and forth in trying to find the proper page for a given web address. This increases the time it take to find and load the specified page

Compress files using Gzip – compressing files helps bring a number of files down into one collection known as a zip

Tip #6: Be Social

Done correctly and regularly, social media can have a huge positive impact on your company’s exposure and profitability. Choose highly active social media platforms that are relevant to your business and industry such as: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

These are just a few tips to improve your social presence which helps build your domain authority:

Create your social profiles and link them to your website

Create social icons on your website and link those to the appropriate social profiles

Share your articles, blog posts, testimonials, new products or services

Create meaningful content tailored to each network – remember not all social networks are the same or have the same audience

Use hashtags (#) in your posts so they are easier to find for those searching in Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Consider providing customer support from your social profiles – customers love being able to reach companies where they hang out the most

See which networks your competition is using and start implementing those into your marketing strategy.

Final Thoughts

We know now that domain authority is important for a number of reasons. It allows you to gain an edge over your competition by receiving more quality leads, web traffic and places your in a higher authoritative position as you build a solid reputation.

You can also use the tools mentioned to scan the DA of your competitors and see what ways you can improve and track your progress.

Before you venture off, here’s a quick checklist on how to increase domain authority. Don’t forget to mark these off as you go.

Pick a domain name that’s relevant to your industry and easy to remember

Optimize your Internal SEO

Optimize your External SEO

Create quality content people will want to link to

Improve your technical SEO by removing broken links and including links throughout your site

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly

Become an authoritative figure in your niche

Make sure your website loads in 3 seconds or less

Be sure to be socially active!

Now’s the Time to Parter with a Marketing Agency!

At iSeed Digital, our results and testimonials speak for themselves. Let us use our expertise to accelerate your business into the future of marketing!

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