Domain Authority is a term coined by Moz, the SEO resource provider used by marketing and search specialists. It's become the industry standard way of assessing a website's performance, considering numerous factors that help paint a complete picture of its overall performance.
Although it's not the only metric you should use when looking at a website, DA can help business owners and digital marketing professionals access a snap assessment of how a website performs compared to other websites.
What Is DA?
DA (Domain Authority) is a ranking score primarily used to help predict the likelihood of a website performing well on search engine results pages (SERPs). It ranges from 0 to 100, with more established websites, such as BBC or Sky News, appearing near the top, while smaller businesses are more likely to appear in the 0-20 range.
A DA score is built using data from the Link Explorer web index, utilising many measurement metrics to help provide a reliable score. Using machine learning to fine-tune the score, it indicates how a website will perform when searched for.
What Does Domain Authority Mean?
It's a term only used to refer to the score given by Moz to assess how likely a website is to rank when searched for, helping us determine how effective a website is when ranking on Google. It doesn't directly impact ranking and is comparable to similar scores on other websites, such as SEMrush's Authority Score.
What Does a High Domain Authority Score Do?
Although a high DA score doesn't do much on its own, it indicates that your website is performing well and is seen as trustworthy and more likely to rank when specific keywords are searched.
This can significantly impact businesses with a higher DA score, meaning that a website is more likely to be found by customers when they search for a keyword associated with the product or service being advertised on the website.
How Can You Use Domain Authority?
As well as being great for attracting inbound traffic, a high DA score is something you can monetise - it can be highly lucrative too! If you have a high enough DA score, you may see digital marketers approach you, asking to publish guest posts on your website. The going rate to publish on a 35+ scoring website is upwards of £200!
What's a Good Domain Authority Score Look Like?
Although there's no set score that you can use as a standard, and a good score doesn't always correlate to a good website, there are a few loose benchmarks that you can use to help gauge how good your DA score is, especially when comparing your score with a similar company or website.
Domain Authority Score Range Explained
Generally, any website scoring below 30 standards has little chance of ranking well for the popular keywords, which, while understandable, can be frustrating if you're creating excellent content, better content than what's being produced by the higher-ranking websites.
For an SME, you want to score in the 30-40 range, which is likely the ceiling that you would be able to rank realistically. That said, it may be possible to reach the mid-40 area after several years of continuous SEO work. This increases your likelihood of ranking on the first page of Google, even when the keyword difficulty is on the higher end.
A score of 50-70 is considered excellent and is generally reserved for large companies that take their SEO and online presence seriously. It indicates that they spend considerable time and resources on their website and actively take steps to improve.
Scoring 70+ is seen as the gold standard, with companies in this range typically being news outlets or market leaders, being referred to by smaller websites that see them as trustworthy sources in articles and thought pieces. At the top end of the DA scoring scale are the BBC, Bloomberg, and CNBC outlets.
Where Does Your Business Rank?
We're not here to pretend to know the intricacies of how it works; the DA scoring system is a metric created to assess the rank-ability of a website and is built using dozens of data sources and machine learning. As an SME, which most of you are, you should be working towards a score in the 30-40 range, constantly pushing to improve your score whenever possible.
What Can You Do to Improve Your Score?
As we've already said, a DA score is assigned using many different data sources. We know that Google places a high emphasis on backlinks, and this is a way that many websites are looking to improve their ranking, including by purchasing backlinks from higher-ranked websites.
If that's a little out of your budget, you should work to ensure that your website is free from errors, indexed correctly, and consistently updated with fresh, keyword-optimised content. There's no silver bullet solution, but creating thoughtful, considered content is a great way to establish brand authority and build organic backlinks.
Are you ready to improve your website's performance? We have the team and expertise in-house to help you rank higher, using keyword-optimised landing pages and blog content to attract relevant website traffic.
To book a free one-hour consultation, submit an online form or give us a call on 01492 463209.
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