Domain Authority: How to Check and Improve Your DA Score

image highlighting the importance of domain authority

Are you looking for ways to make your business appear on the first page of Google? Understanding the concepts of domain authority (DA) is the secret. Domain rating helps you understand how well your site competes in the search engine results. Websites with higher DA rank high on search engines, attracting more traffic and boosting sales.

At Boostability, we have the best SEO experts committed to helping your clientโ€™s site rank high on search engines. We use practical and latest SEO tools to help improve website performance online for better returns. Our digital marketing specialists provide content designed to help improve your site’s DA for success. Keep reading to find out what domain authority is and how to improve your DA.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain authority (DA) is a search engine scoring system created by Moz. It predicts how possible it is for your site to rank on search engines such as Google.

DA is a system that determines how relevant your site is to a particular topic or keyword. If your website is relevant to a keyword in your niche, its chances of appearing on top of search engine result pages (SERPs) are high.

Domain rating serves as a good performance indicator for your website. It helps examine your site’s health/performance in relation to competitors. With this rating, you understand which areas of your website need improving to outshine your competitors.

What Is a Domain Authority Score?

A domain authority score measures a domain or webpage’s impact on its ability to rank on SERPs.

A website or search engine rankings score grades a website’s quality and efficacy of SEO practices. The score represents your site’s trustworthiness, popularity, and authority.

DA score is any value between 1 and 100 assigned to your website based on factors like inbound links. It influences your site’s ability to rank on search engines. For instance, if your site has a higher DA score, its chances of ranking high on SERPs are high.

How Website Rating Score Is Calculated

Domain authority score calculation often relies on several factors. Some of these factors include inbound links and root domains. A site with many inbound links from relevant and authoritative domains score higher. Here are two steps involved in calculating your DA score:

Step 1. A machine learning algorithm helps find trustworthy and popular domains on the internet. It does so by analyzing website traffic data, backlink data, and search data. This step works best if your website already exists and has several posts.

Step 2. Another algorithm watches how your site gains traffic to raise or lower its authority. Here, the metrics used include:

  • Total backlinks
  • Number of outbound links from referring domains
  • Quantity and quality of referring domains
  • Inbound links (Follow vs. no-follow links pointing to your site)
  • Outbound links (follow vs. no-follow links leaving your site)
  • Referring subnets
  • Referring IPs

Your website’s ranking score relies on your competitors. It means any improvements made by your competitors affect your score. That’s even if you don’t change anything on your website.

Good vs. Bad Score (What Is a Good Score?)

The search engine ranking score ranges from 1 to 100. A high domain authority score is one above 50. Here are the various score categories to help you differentiate between a high vs. low DA score:

  • 1 – 30: Low
  • 30 – 40: Below average
  • 40 – 50: Average
  • 50 – 60: High
  • 60 – 70: Very High
  • 80- 100: Excellent

Websites with higher DA scores rank high in the SERPs. Such sites have high quality and quantity of inbound links. It means they have many links from external authoritative sites like governmental bodies and educational institutes.

Examples of websites that rank high on search engines include Apple, Microsoft, and Google. The brands have excellent DA (between 95 and 100). Newer and small business sites often have lower DA (about 10 to 20) as they have few or lack quality links from credible sources.

Why Does Industry/Competition Matter?

Competition helps determine how relevant your site is to your industry. It influences your site’s rankings on search engines and business success.

If your competitor has a DA of 70 and you have 20, your competitor’s website will rank higher for the same target keyword. That’s because they have a greater command of SERPs, which attracts more visitors and generates more leads than you.

At Boostability, we understand that improving your DA is a matter of survival. We provide valuable SEO tools to improve your DA and beat the competition.

How To Check Your Website Score?

A domain authority checking tool allows you to determine how your website ranks against competitors online. Follow these steps to check your website score with our SEO Analysis Tool:

  • Website URL
  • Full name
  • Email address
  • Phone number
  • The free SEO analysis tool helps you conduct competitive analysis for your site. It determines how successful your site is at generating leads.

Why Is Domain Authority Important?

Domain rating helps show how your site ranks for a specific keyword on various search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Google.

The higher your DA score, the greater the chance your site will appear on search engine results. It helps your website attract more traffic, increasing site popularity and sales.

DA score offers valuable insight into the web traffic you get from search engines. If your website ranking score is low, you get to understand areas that need improvement. A DA checking tool helps you know if a lack of quality links makes your site’s ranking score drop. This lets you focus on getting more quality links by creating an effective link-building strategy.

Metrics used within Website Authority Checkers

Domain rating offers various metrics that help you make proper decisions about your site’s health and performance. Some of the metrics a website authority checker provides include:

  • Website Score. An SEO analysis tool helps you determine your website score. This score is a valuable tool that enables you to understand how your site performs online. Based on the findings, you can tell what to do to generate more visitors, leads, and sales for your business.
  • Organic Search Analysis. The tool helps you view the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your site. You get to know how to get more quality backlinks to improve your score.
  • Local Presence Analysis. With a DA checker, you examine your local presence in relation to your competitors. This enables you to identify areas to improve if your local presence is low.
  • Social Presence. SEO website analysis tools help determine the number of people you reach through social media pages. This enables you to access more audiences, get more likes, and interact with a larger audience.
  • Mobile Analysis. You get to check how your website performs on various mobile devices worldwide. At Boostability, we help optimize your site for mobile-friendliness to reach more audiences and generate more quality leads.

How To Improve Your Domain Authority

Improving your website’s ranking helps you secure high rankings on search engine results. This enables your site to rank higher than your competitors, attracting more organic visitors who become loyal customers. Here are various ways to improve your site’s DA score and get better results.

Get High-Quality Backlinks

A backlink is a link from other sites pointing towards yours. It helps tell readers of other websites that your site has good content. This means your site is relevant to a particular keyword. Backlinks play a major role in calculating your site’s DA as they are among the top 2 factors that help a website rank high.

Getting quality backlinks helps increase organic traffic and strengthen your link profile. It offers an excellent way to increase your DA and rankings on search engines.

Generate Quality Content

Creating high-quality content makes your web posts relevant and helpful to your audience’s needs. They are likely to share them with others, increasing your chances of getting quality backlinks from high-authority sites like governmental bodies. When different sites link to your website, your root domains increase.

Conduct Link Audit

A link audit helps improve your DA by removing all toxic links taken from spammy websites. It aims to ensure all backlinks pointing to your site are valid and safe for your site’s DA.

An SEO tool allows you to identify healthy links. The tool lists broken links that require changing to help improve your DA.

Optimize Your Website

Optimizing your site’s structure and user-friendliness enables search engines to crawl your web pages and index them on SERPs easily. The process involves assessing how your site’s performance on different mobile devices.

With an SEO tool, you easily optimize your site structure and aspects, including website pages and images. Your website becomes responsive on mobile devices, increasing user experience and DA.

Improve Internal Links

Internal linking involves optimizing link structure for user-friendliness. Properly optimized internal link structures help pass value to other pages on your website. This makes your site crawlable by search engine bots for easy page indexing. You can interact with your visitors, keep them engaged, lower the bounce rate, and improve DA.

Is It a Google Ranking Factor?

Domain Authority isn’t a factor Google uses to rank websites. It doesn’t affect the search results pages on Google. Your site’s DA may drop due to inbound links and mobile friendliness, but it doesn’t mean your Google ranking will reduce.

DA is a single metric designed to help gauge your site performance. It shows how your site will likely rank on search engines against your competitors.

The metric only serves as a ranking signal that gives you an idea of your SEO strategy’s effectiveness. It offers a great way to help you follow the best SEO practices for higher rankings.

Work With Boostability To Improve Domain Authority

High domain authority helps predict how relevant your site is to search engines. It shows how your site performs in search engines against your competitors in your niche. Boostability offers top notch white label SEO services to help your clientโ€™s rank at the top of Google. Check out our free SEO analysis tool to help you inspect website scores. We have a team of SEO experts who use the latest tools to help improve a website’s DA. Contact us today to get started!

Kyle Southwick

Kyle is the former Partner Marketing Lead at Boostability. Since graduating from Utah Valley University with a Bachelorโ€™s Degree in Marketing, Kyle has developed a passion for creating SEO and Digital Marketing content to help educate and inform readers, customers, and partners through various marketing channels. He has previously worked with clients directly on Boostabilityโ€™s Client Management team and loves to help businesses succeed online. Outside of work, Kyle enjoys playing sports, skiing, trying new restaurants, and spending time with family.