7 Steps to Increase Domain Authority in 2021

SEO has come a long way in the many years, and with each passing one, marketers often find some new concept to track down and celebrate. Backlinks and Authorities, the most trending concepts of SEO are proving to be more important and relevant to a site’s success by the day!

Domain Authority is a concept discussed by every SEO professional and website owner today and rightly so! DA is a metric or a numbering system that indicates the authority of your entire website. This system has a scale of 1 to 100, with a higher ranking increasing your chances of ranking higher on search pages.

Domain Authority is a metric that lets Google know how high to rank your page on the SERPs and how relevant your page is to the search query. It is important to know that even though DA is a crucial factor to consider in your strategy, DA cannot influence your actual ranking and is just a guide. You can have low DA scores and still rank high on Google’s search results page.

However, many experts try to find the best ways on how to improve Domain Authority, as it can be one of the easiest ways to drive organic traffic to your website.

7 Steps to Improve Your Domain Authority

There are many methods of improving your domain authority scores, but some key aspects must be observed. Here are a few tried and tested steps that help you improve your scores and stay relevant to Google.

• Off-Page SEO

Working on your off-page SEO tactics is a great first step. Your link profile is more valuable than any other metric out there. Sites that have a clean and high-quality link profile indefinitely have higher DA scores than other websites with average profiles.

So what would comprise a good link profile? If a website has incoming links from high authority pages, links from relevant sources, low or no bad links, and has sourced from many credible and unique domains; it is said to have a good link profile.

The process of improving this profile is what Off-page SEO does, and focusing on this will show you techniques to quire great links. This will improve both your page and domain authority and your overall ranking as well.

To improve your link profile, ensure you remove any bad links, use tools to find toxic or broken links, contact website owners of shady websites to take down your link, or at least add a ‘nofollow tag’ or use Google to disavow the link.

There are 2 significant approaches to acquire great link profiles:

1. Natural Link building: Natural link building involves having great, unique, and relevant content on your website, which will, in turn, attract links from other high ranking sites. This theory is often known as ‘natural link building’ and proposes that if someone finds your site and likes your content, the link to it from one of their articles. But for this to work, the looker needs to consider your content worthy of linking to. Having content that is informative, engaging, insightful yet easy to read will attract more natural links from credible sources.
2. Blogger Outreach: The second way to have a good link profile is by reaching out to other websites, blogs, or media owners and letting them know about your brand. You can increase your links just by doing this. Of course, it sounds simpler than it is. You need to be in a position to offer other site owners something that can benefit them as well. However, you can gradually increase your overall linking and get a good domain authority score.

• On-page SEO: The next is looking at your on-page SEO aspects relevant to optimizing your web pages and content. The most important factors to look into are titles and descriptions, proper use of heading tags within your content, SEO optimized permalinks and URL structure, SEO optimized image, video, and audio, sufficient use of relevant keywords, internal linking, and formatting your page. Quality of content makes a huge difference in your site’s overall ranking which is why it is crucial to keep fresh and interesting content.

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO is related to the low-level tasks of SEO and if you can get this right from the start, you won’t have to worry too much about it. However, if you get it wrong in the beginning, you will have to keep circling back to it until you fix it. Bad technical management can cause low domain authority scores. You can check on some aspects to ensure you’re on the right track, like register your site with Google Search Console, create an XML sitemap for your site, check your robots.txt settings, consider migrating your site to HTTPS, add structured data, and ensure you have a defined breadcrumb menu on all your pages.

• Mobile Friendly site: It’s no longer an option for your site to be compatible with mobiles. It is now mandatory for all websites to have a mobile-friendly version if they want to have any chance of succeeding. This is because mobile searchers are currently at 60% higher than desktop searches and mobile-friendliness is an actual ranking factor. Having only a desktop version of your site can affect your DA scores negatively. Try out AMP or accelerated mobile pages to support your website.

• Page Speed: One of the known ranking factors Google’s algorithm considers is the speed of a webpage. Websites that have an abysmal loading time have very few advantages over those with extremely fast speeds. Improving your webpage’s speed will not only improve your authority and ranking but will also greatly improve your user’s experience and lead to more loyal customers.

It is always suggested to hire a technical expert to loom into speed issues, but if you can remove unnecessary plugins, upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, ask your host to give you a server performance report or even move to a faster server. Use streaming services like YouTube for videos to avoid huge files increasing loading time.

• Increase Social Signals: Although Google states that these signals aren’t a part of the ranking algorithm. There is a correlation between high ranking pages and social signals. Pages with more likes, shares, or tweets tend to be more popular on Google. To increase your domain authority, you should look into your Facebook business page and try to get more followers, keep an active social media presence, have a social media bar on all your webpages, and check how good your content looks when it is shared using social sharing buttons.

• Patience: Incorporate a healthy amount of patience in your strategy because Domain authority is not something that can just be increased with the click of a button. It takes time for search engine crawlers to register any changes you have made to your website and you will have to continuously make changes. Be patient and systematically work on the above aspects so you can improve your domain authority.

Do not try to obsess solely on improving your DA and try working on your overall SEO goals to see a completely positive effect. A high DA score is ideal but it still doesn’t guarantee you everything you want. So aim big and think far ahead, try to incorporate a strategy that works for your site long-term and methodically improves your DA.

Author Bio: Dileep Thekkethil, a Journalism Postgraduate, was formerly with a US-based online magazine, is the Associate Director at Stan Ventures. He is a frequent blogger who keeps a tab on the latest updates in the SEO and technology arena.