What is Domain Authority and Why Does it Matter?

Domain authority is a specific score that can help you learn how your website will perform on search engine result pages (SERPs) compared to competitors in your space. This is an important metric to monitor for SEO purposes as it will tell you how search algorithms view your brand, your business, and your credibility.

A domain authority score shows a website’s influence, reputation, and authority. These are important factors for search engine ranking.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a vital metric that can help determine the likelihood of your website being found in searches. Developed by Moz, it’s an algorithm that creates a score of 1-100, with 100 being the best. Your score can reflect ranking factors, and it can go a long way towards establishing your page authority in a certain area. It can also be very useful for determining your page rank in any search.

Why Does It Matter?

Domain authority matters because it demonstrates how your site performs compared to other sites. It can help show how authoritative your website is and how well it is optimized for searches. A higher score means that your website is viewed as better than competing websites. 

A domain rating is not the most important factor in searches or page SEO. Quality of content, among other factors, is what is used to make that determination. With that said, it can be used to determine the authority and quality of content on a page which factors into page ranking. As such, improving your domain score can have a positive effect on your search engine ranking. 

How is Domain Authority Calculated?

As noted below, there are a number of authorities that calculate this score. All of them have a slightly different method of doing so. However, domain authority is calculated by a proprietary algorithm that usually examines the quality of content and the number of links and backlinks that a website has created. This score attempts to somewhat parrot the way in which Google will rank your page when it is crawling the web.

How to Check Domain Authority

You can check your domain authority by using any number of tools established by a variety of authorities, including MOZ, AHREFs, and SEMRUSH. All can be useful for determining your authority metric and are excellent checker tools. All three of these authorities have free and paid options, with free options available to give webmasters additional resources. 

How Often Should You It?

Moz recommends that you check your domain authority score every 3-4 weeks. This enables you to get a good idea of whether your website changes have positively or negatively impacted the overall score. However, it also allows you to see if changes that Moz or others have made to their formula — presumably changes based on updates that are reflective of Google searches — will impact your score.

There are some circumstances in which checking your score on at least a weekly basis may be beneficial. For example, if you are particularly dependent upon SEO or in a business that is highly competitive, you may want to check your score more often. 

What is a Good Score?

Remember, a high domain authority score is a good thing, and the higher domain score you get, the better. 50-60 is considered a high DA score. Anything above 60 is considered an excellent score.

How to Increase Domain Authority

There are many ways to improve your domain authority. This includes:

  • On-page techniques include things you control on your page. This includes high-quality content, high-quality backlinks, appropriately named root domains, a well-designed website that increases the user experience, and using SEO tools to conduct keyword research.
  • Off-page techniques, meaning items that are done off of your webpage, are important. Building an extensive backlink profile achieved by getting a number of backlinks from other web pages, is one of the most important metrics of off-page techniques. This is why so many SEO experts discuss inbound links and link building. Other off-page techniques include sharing content on social media, which can increase your organic traffic.

How is Domain Authority Different than Page Authority?

The difference is between page and domain. A domain is one website or a set of websites all linked to the same URL. A page is an individual page located within a domain (or on a website). Different pages can have different levels of authority and search engine optimization, but domains will have the same authority across the entire URL. 

Best Ways to Integrate Domain Authority into SEO Strategy

As you can likely see, there is extensive overlap between domain authority and SEO optimization. Some potential methods you can use to integrate your MOZ domain authority strategy into your SEO strategy include: 

  • Having a high-quality digital marketing campaign and sharing your content on social media platforms such as LinkedIn.
  • Expanding the quality of the content you offer, such as by hiring an SEO copywriter or using guest posting. 
  • Getting your website referenced on a popular page, like Wikipedia.
  • Building a good linking profile, complete with high-quality internal links, external links, popular linking domains, and more. Remember, the number of links isn’t nearly as important as having links from other pages with good domain authority or other high authority sites. This is why it’s important to find another web site’s domain authority before seeking backlinks. Fortunately, you can find this information on MOZ’s domain authority checker. 

Using MOZ’s DA checker tool can be extremely helpful for your website: It can help show how easily your website will be found in a Google search, making it one of the more useful SEO tools on the market.