How important is domain authority for SEO?

Domain authority has an impact on your website’s keyword rankings. So what is it and how can you improve yours to ensure the best SEO results?

Many different factors feed into your domain authority score, creating a snapshot of the strength of your website in relation to its competitors. The higher your score, the more likely your selected keywords are expected to rank, making it an important metric to track.

Keeping an eye on your domain authority means you can be proactive if it begins to drop, taking action before it has a negative impact on your SEO.

What is domain authority?

Search engines, including Google use domain authority to measure the credibility of websites. The resultant score helps them to determine rankings for specific keywords and topics, so they can send traffic to the most relevant websites where quality content is published.
This means domain authority has a direct influence on search engine results pages (SERPs) and is therefore crucial for SEO. Ideally, your domain authority score should increase over time as your website grows, demonstrating that it’s being built in the right way.

Factors that contribute to domain authority and how to improve yours

There are multiple factors taken into consideration when domain authority is calculated, including the age of the website and overall experience, but the most important elements pertain to links. The quality and quantity of inbound links will have the biggest impact on your score.

While informative and well-written content should naturally attract relevant backlinks, it’s not enough to simply sit back and wait for them to happen. A link-building strategy is an important part of your SEO masterplan and when executed correctly, will be reflected in your domain authority score.

At this point it’s worth noting that there are good ways to obtain links and bad ways. Avoid buying links or engaging the services of spammy websites or link farms, as this low-quality referral tactic won’t serve you or your audience well.

Link-building tactics that will improve your domain authority in a sustainable manner include:

• Linkable assets – create content that other sites will want to link to and run an outreach campaign to make them aware of it.
• Blogger relationships – build partnerships with bloggers to encourage them to link to your website.
• Guest posting – write content for other websites, which include a link back to your own content.
• Request edits – contact quality sites and ask them to include a link to a relevant page of yours on content that’s already published.

How to measure domain authority

There are a number of tools you can use to check your domain authority score, with Moz and Semrush among the most well known. It’s a good idea to use the same tool consistently to make comparisons, as each one uses slightly different processes to create a score and you could end up with some anomalies.