There is a secret number that every website has that helps decide whether it should rank higher or lower than another website.
That number is your Domain Authority. It’s one of the most important numbers you should be monitoring — and it’s often overlooked.
Domain Authority is like the credit score of your domain.
The typical situation
You want to rank higher in Google for your niche. Say you sell leather horse saddles, and you think you should be the first result in Google. You sell the best product and you’re committed to making the best content.
You do all the keyword research and find the perfect content to write to win that top spot. You create three beautiful landing pages with detailed content on buying leather saddles and how to maintain them.
You publish, and wait anxiously for that precious top spot. You check in three weeks later — and you’re nowhere on the front page of Google.
You finally find your content. It’s on page 6, 8th spot down.
What happened? Why didn’t your superior content take the top spot?
If your content really was better than the sites ranking above you, the most likely reason you didn’t rank is lower Domain Authority.
What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority is a number from 0 to 100 that scores how trustworthy your website should be. The higher the number, the better your chances of ranking for your topic.
You can check your Domain Authority online with Ahrefs. Moz and others also provide DR checkers, but we’ve found the results vary — Ahrefs tends to be the most consistent.
Your Domain Authority (or DR for short) is built up over time as other sites link to yours. The higher the Domain Authority of the site linking to you, the more your own Domain Authority climbs.
But your Domain Authority isn’t capped by the authority of the sites linking to you. High-authority links boost you faster, but they aren’t mandatory. A site can sit at a DR of 51 without a single DR-50+ site pointing to it — built instead from a large number of links in the 20–30 range.
Domain Authority also increases with exponential difficulty. It might take little effort to go from a DR of 10 to 20. But it can take 10× the links to move from 60 to 70.
How to increase your Domain Authority
Increasing your authority isn’t just a matter of getting a bunch of websites to link to you. You want to be strategic and spend your time earning the most authoritative, most relevant links.
Every website is categorized into topics and niches. A mining-and-industrial site linking to a boating-and-recreation site does little good — the topics aren’t relevant to each other. But a link between two sites in the same world (say, two recreation brands) carries real weight, and a link from a major industry name to a smaller site in that same industry passes a lot of authority.
Think of links as the currency of the web. You want to receive more than you hand out. There’s no magic incoming-to-outgoing ratio — but, like any good financial plan, you want to be earning more than you spend.
Business memberships and chambers
You probably belong to your local Chamber of Commerce and a few other business memberships. Most of these organizations have online member directories. Check that your business is listed and linking to your website — these are usually the easiest links to pick up, because you’ve already paid for them.
Local and national news sources
If your company has ever been mentioned in the news, see whether they’ll link back to your website. News sites carry great authority as trusted sources. When you send out press releases, include plenty of links back to content on your site — chances are the journalist will leave them in for context.
Government and educational institutions
Links from government (.gov) and educational (.edu) domains are the highest-value links you can get. These sites are seen as so authoritative and rarely link out. Links from them are gold.
If you’ve done work for a university, ask whether they’d write a piece about it and credit you with a link. Government sites may link to you if you offer an information service for the public good. Get creative and try to land these gold mines.
Avoid artificially gaining links
People inevitably try to game the system. They buy links. They spin up their own networks of sites that link to each other. These are all techniques that will get you in trouble.
Google is smart. It has teams of people and automated algorithms dedicated to finding unnatural link growth. Your link growth needs to look organic — if you had 10 links over five years and then suddenly add 100 in a month, that looks suspicious.
Spend your time creating great content that people want to share and link to. Five hours spent earning a single backlink from a 70-DR site will outperform three hours spent collecting eight different 20-DR links.
Conclusion
Understanding your website’s Domain Authority is a vital part of your SEO strategy — knowing which publishers to target is half the battle. Building links is hard and takes time to gain momentum. Make something worth linking to, and create content others will want to share.
Increase your Domain Authority so you can beat your competitors in Google’s search results and watch your traffic climb.
If you’d rather have a team handle the SEO and content engine behind this, that’s part of what we do — see support & growth or start a project.