SEO, or search engine optimisation can be something that is often shrouded in mystery to those that don’t operate in the industry. And, as a business owner you may know that you need SEO to help boost your visibility and rankings, but the essence and work that goes into it can be incredibly difficult to grasp.
It would be like asking us to explain how you replace and plumb in a new boiler. Clouded by science.
So, today we wanted to take things back to basis and talk about a really important metric of your website that will have a direct impact from a good SEO strategy. It’s all about Domain Authority. It’s the thing that underpins your website, and one of the metrics that everyone wants to grow.
Let’s delve into Domain Authority in detail, and the reasons why it’s so important for your business.
What Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a metric introduced by Moz, this metric is an indication of your websites trust and authority on the internet. It is determined on a scale of 0-100. A brand new website will start at 0, and it should steadily grow over time by doing the right things to demonstrate your authority to google.
Domain authority can be influenced by a number of factors including; backlinks – how many high authority (high DA) websites are linking back to yours, how much high quality traffic your website receives, the level of quality content on your website, consistency and even page speed.
Why Is DA Important For Your Business?
Domain authority is one of the most important metrics of having an online website as it brings opportunity.
A high domain authority means that you have adequately demonstrated your Expertise, Authority and Trust to Google. What does this mean to you?
It will help you to rank higher for the keywords you want to rank for in your business, helping you to rise above your competitors. In beating the competition and working your way to a page 1 position, this opens you up to an organic stream of passive leads/sales/enquiries without having to spend any money to acquire them.
That is the power of a high domain authority.
If you have a niche content site or are a blogger, having a high domain authority means that more brands will want to work with you to get their links placed onto your website. This can be a highly lucrative income stream for websites with a high domain authority.
The important thing to remember is that you cannot buy your way to a higher DA. It is something that needs to be earned, and proving your authority in the industry by writing great quality content that adds value to the internet is one of the best places to start.
Here are a few things you can start actioning today to help increase your DA.
3 Ways You Can Increase Your DA
Great Quality Content
High quality content that actually adds value to Google is one of the best ways to improve your presence on Google, and demonstrate that expertise you carry as a business.
We’re not talking about picking a title on Google and copying what everyone else is doing, with the new Google Helpful Content Update, websites that are churning out the same content as everyone else and not actually adding value will have their whole site affected by this new algorithm. This is the biggest core update since Panda in 2011 and it’s likely going to affect a huge number of sites that have been taking the lazy, easy route.
Google needs to see how you have your expertise, rather than just thinking of a topic and copying what others say. If you can demonstrate this and write high quality articles you’re onto a winner.
The idea of creating such great quality content that ranks is that other sites may want to then link to your great post, this is free backlink building and will massively help your DA to grow over time.
Backlink Building
Building a strong backlink profile has a direct impact on your DA. There are a number of ways you can go about generating backlinks to your site.
As I just mentioned, creating high quality content should attract backlinks, this can be a slower burn, but it’s a free way to go about it and you can score some nice backlinks just by writing amazing stuff about things you already know about.
Do you have any suppliers or clients that have websites and could link to you? This is a quick win and a great way to start acquiring those early links for a new website.
Now, you can go down the buying backlinks route which a lot of businesses do. This isn’t an essential, but a lot of businesses do it to fast track their DA and hopes of improving their rankings. There are some issues that come with this, buying £5 for 30 links is likely going to come and bite your website on the bum. They’ll end up being spammy links, and could even lead to a Google penalty as it sees it as inauthentic, and spammy.
Google also wants to detect and work out whether this backlink to your website is a natural addition. If it’s the first time mentioning and linking to you it could be seen as an anomaly, if that website links to you twice, it certainly looks more like a natural inclusion and they can trust that website for putting that link through to you.
Backlink building is imperative, but it’s important to consider the ways this it’s being carried out. A short term win is likely to be problematic in the long run.
Internal Link Building
Another thing you can get started on today is internal link building. Think of it like a big web on your website. How are your posts connected, are they to do with each other? Do you have a range of categories that have nothing in common? Let Google crawl your website easily and understand the structure of your content.
One of the best ways to do this is go back through your old blog posts and start creating internal links where there is natural anchor text to lead out to the other blog post. If you have 100s of blog posts to go through, LinkWhisper is a fantastic plugin for WordPress which bolts onto your blogs and auto suggests internal links with anchor text. You literally select which ones you want to link to and click save. It’s so easy and one of the quickest ways to get your internal link building game up to scratch.
Internal links help with DA because it helps Google understand the structure of your website more which can help you to rank better for your chosen keywords.
In Summary
Domain authority is something that all businesses should start showing an interest in, it can be the difference to hitting the top spots and gaining passive leads and sales, to sitting at the top of page 2 and generating nothing.
If you’re looking to rank higher on Google, gain more passive sales and grow your domain authority, do get in touch with us at Bagel Digital, SEO strategists based in Plymouth, Devon serving across the UK and beyond.
