Domain authority (or DA) is a proxy measurement of how much authority your site has in Google’s eyes. Content operations could profit from paying more attention to DA.
Roughly speaking, this authority is measured is by the number of links pointing to your site from other reputable or popular sites.
If a lot of reputable sites link to you, the reasoning goes, you must be pretty reliable and useful.
How to see your domain authority (and your competitors’)
Download the Mozbar extension for Chrome. It will display a domain authority score for any site you visit.
Who cares?
You do.
A high domain authority score means it is more likely for your content to rank well in search results. And that means more traffic to your site.
So this matters to anyone in web publishing or marketing. (I.e. you.)
“Increasing domain authority” is a nice goal or KPI for a new site, because that’s when your DA is easiest to raise.
The increase in traffic from rising DA should be sustainable, unlike the bounce you get from a single viral article.
For this reason DA offers good long-term balance when paired with short-term page view KPIs.
So how do you raise your DA score?
Get more links to your site. Publishers look askance at paid link-building services, and in many cases rightly so. (Spammy links don’t help your DA.) But here are two legitimate tactics that can help:
– Simple: Ask your contributors to link to you from their own sites. Their sites may have low DA scores, but getting a bunch of these links can’t hurt.
– More ambitious: Contribute articles to major sites and link back to your own.
Example: This article ran on AdWeek and then was syndicated to HuffPo. HuffPo has an extremely high DA score, and the article includes links to my agency’s site, its blog, and another article on the blog.
Accumulate good links over time and your DA score should rise, bringing more search traffic with it.