How to Increase Domain Authority in 2024: Ultimate Guide

How to Increase Domain Authority in 2024: Ultimate Guide

Ivan Escott

Ivan Escott

Partnerships Manager at Respona

How to Increase Domain Authority in 2024: Ultimate Guide

Domain Authority is one of the most tracked metrics in the world of SEO and is one of the strongest key performance indicators of a website’s well-being.

In this guide, we will be discussing:

  • What is Moz Domain Authority and how it is calculated
  • The benefits of increasing Domain Authority
  • Proven strategies for improving your DA score

Let’s get into it.

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What is Domain Authority?

Moz Domain Authority (DA) is a proprietary algorithm developed by Moz in 2009 as a way to measure the overall website authority and the likelihood that it will rank well on search engine result pages. 

The algorithm is based on a variety of factors, including the analysis of the website’s backlinks, its MozRank, MozTrust, and page authority. 

domain authority example
Image source: Moz

The score is logarithmic on a scale from 0 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

It is used as a metric to compare websites and to track the performance of a website over time. 

It is also used by SEO and digital marketing professionals to determine the relative strength of competing websites and to inform their search engine optimization strategies.

Moz Domain Authority vs Ahrefs Domain Rating

Domain Rating or DR is another commonly used metric to measure a website’s “strength”.

On the surface, it is quite similar to Domain Authority, however, they are not quite the same.

The main difference between Domain Authority and Domain Rating is in terms of the metrics used to calculate the score. 

domain rating example
Image source: Ahrefs

Both Domain Authority and Domain Rating use a website’s backlink profile as the main ranking factor in calculating the score, but Domain Authority uses metrics such as MozTrust and MozRank, while Domain Rating only uses link velocity and other SEO metrics. 

Additionally, Domain Authority is updated monthly while Domain Rating is updated daily.

How is Domain Authority Calculated?

The score is determined by a combination of several different factors, including the following:

Number and Quality of Links

The number of backlinks pointing to a website, as well as the quality of those links (determined by metrics such as domain authority, PageRank, and domain relevance).

Anchor Text 

The anchor text of the links pointing to a website helps search engines determine the topic of the page being linked to.

Linking domains’ Authority

Links from websites with high authority scores are seen as more valuable.

Domain Age 

Websites that have been around longer are often seen as more trustworthy and are more likely to have higher domain authority scores.

Social Signals 

The presence of social media profiles, as well as the number of likes, shares, and other engagements, can influence a website’s domain authority score.

SEO Optimization

The presence of targeted keywords, as well as the overall structure and readability of the content, can also affect the domain authority score.

These are just the most important factors that come into play when determining the Domain Authority score.

According to Moz themselves, DA comes from a machine learning algorithm’s predictions about how often Google is using a particular domain name in its search results.

Because it’s a prediction based on countless factors (information about which can become unavailable over time or vice versa), you shouldn’t treat Domain Authority is the one-all-be-all metric, but rather as a comparative one to stack your website up against your competitors.

What is a Good Domain Authority Score?

Generally speaking, the higher your authority score is, the better. 

However, in reality, things are not as black and white as they might seem at first.

Once again, according to Moz themselves, DA is best used as a “comparative” metric, so it really does not have much of a meaning on its own.

However, it immediately gains meaning when used within a competitive landscape, such as your niche. 

For example, here is our own Domain Authority:

respona domain authority
Image source: Moz

And this is the authority of one of our competitors, Hunter:

hunter domain authority
Image source: Moz

This means that, on average, Hunter is more likely to show up higher in search results than us for the “money” keywords such as “email finder”:

short-tail search results example

However, with some smart long-tail keyword choices and proper SEO optimization, we can still outrank Hunter for certain queries: 

long-tail search results example

So, after all, what is a good Domain Authority score? 

One that is higher than that of your competitors.

How to Check Domain Authority? 

Since Domain Authority is Moz’s proprietary metric, you would need access to one of Moz’s paid plans for unlimited reports.

moz pricing
Image source: Moz

However, Moz also offers up to 3 free daily checks with their Domain Analysis tools.

Alternatively, there are several free third-party tools like Website SEO Checker that allow you to run DA searches as well (even in bulk).

website seo checker
Image source: Website SEO Checker

However if result accuracy is of the essence (which it should be), we recommend using Moz. 

Seeing that DA is their creation, after all. 

Why Should You Increase Domain Authority?

A higher Domain Authority is generally associated with higher website performance, but what does that mean, exactly? 

Let’s take a closer look. 

Higher Rankings

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, the whole point of developing Domain Authority was to predict how likely a domain is to rank high on search results.

So, was Moz able to achieve it? 

While we were not able to find easily-digestibly research on the correlation between Domain Authority and Google SERP rankings, there is a very similar study done by Backlinko on Ahrefs’ counterpart, Domain Rating and rankings.

backlinko on domain rating and rankings correlation
Image source: Backlinko

As you can see, domains with a higher DR score are more likely to rank in the top spots of Google search results.

And seeing that DR and DA use a lot of the same metrics to come up with the score, we can only conclude that higher Domain Authority also has a similar effect.

In addition to helping you outrank your competition, having a higher DA than your competitors will also make it more difficult for them to outperform you until they are able to improve their own score to a comparable level. 

More Traffic

Higher rankings naturally translate into more organic traffic coming your way straight from search results.

In fact, the number 1 search result gets over 27% of all traffic for any given query, while the second and third get about 15% and 11%, respectively. 

backlinko on organic ctr
Image source: Backlinko

This means that over half of total clicks go to one of the first three results. 

Besides organic traffic, a high DA can also help you generate referral traffic.

Referral traffic is the clicks that come to your website through high quality backlinks on other resources. 

If you are seen as knowledgeable, trustworthy, and authoritative within your niche, other people are much more likely to link to you, directing some referral traffic to your page as well as PageRank

Brand Recognition

All of this has a snowball effect of sorts. 

The higher you rank on search engines, the more people are going to see your website and click on your links, the more likely you are to stand out in their memory.

And if you start ranking high across a number of relevant keywords within your niche, people are going to start noticing. 

Improved Conversions

Once people have noticed and acknowledged your trustworthiness within your niche, it will become much easier to convert them into paying customers – especially if your product/service has a strong value proposition. 

So, to sum it up, a higher Domain Authority helps you to: 

  • Rank higher in search engines
  • Generate organic and referral traffic
  • Establish trustworthiness and improve brand recognition
  • Improve your conversion rates

So, is it worth your time? You decide.

Now, let’s take a look at some specific strategies for boosting your Domain Authority.

How to Increase Domain Authority?

Since a strong backlink profile is one of the biggest contributing factors to a website’s Domain Authority score, link building is the first tactic on our list.

Link building is the process of acquiring inbound link placements on other qualitative resources within your niche, typically through cold email outreach. 

There are dozens of different link building strategies, but let’s focus on just one in our example. 

One of our favorite techniques is the anchor text strategy. 

Its premise is to find non-competing articles within your niche that mention your target keyword somewhere in the content and then reach out to the website owner or content manager pitching to include your link.

There are four steps to this process: prospecting (or finding the articles you want to get included in), writing your email template, finding contact emails, and personalizing pitches before launching.

For each step of the way, we will be using our own software, Respona.

Prospecting

To speed up our prospecting, we will be using one of our built-in campaign templates. 

You guessed it – the anchor text one.

selecting a campaign template in respona

Using this template saves you a considerable amount of time by using advanced search operators for you, and creating your email template right there, in a matter of minutes.

All you have to do is fill out a few fields.

anchor text campaign template in respona

In the first field, paste the URL of the article you’d like to promote. In our example, it’s our guide on content distribution.

In the next field, enter in your target keyword, followed by a few other, relevant keywords or phrases. 

Make sure to keep these targeted to your content so Respona is able to find relevant results.

In the content description field, briefly explain what your article is about and why you think it’s a good fit for your prospect’s post.

Finally, in the incentive section, mention how your prospect would benefit from collaborating with you. 

Such an incentive can be an indirect link from an upcoming guest posting article of yours, a mention in your newsletter, social shares, etc. 

All of the info you type in will be pulled directly into your email template, which you can see in the bottom left. 

Click “Use this template” to access the campaign editor. 

respona campaign editor

As you can see, all of the searches are already configured for you so you don’t have to worry about using advanced search operators yourself.

Just click “Continue” and set any additional SEO filters you desire on the next page.

setting additional seo filters

When done, run the automation and wait for it to finish. All of it is done in the cloud, so you don’t have to keep the window open while you’re waiting. 

After the automation is complete, review its results and move on to the next step.

Writing Your Email Sequence

Since we used a campaign template, we already have our email sequence pre-configured.

preparing an email sequence in respona

However, there are still a few things we can do to improve it.

Firstly, let’s change the delay between messages to 5 days instead of 7. 

You can do so by clicking on the pencil icon in each step.

changin delays between emails

You’re also free to add extra follow-ups by clicking on the “Create new step” button at the bottom, but for link building purposes, we recommend sticking to 1 or two follow-ups max to avoid spamming.

Speaking of spamming, let’s check our email for spam words. Click on the red dot in the top right corner of the email editor to pull up Respona’s reply chance estimator.

estimating reply chance

Looks like we don’t have any spam words, and stand a decent chance of getting a response with our current pitch.

Before we move on to the next step, let’s add one final thing to our template – an unsubscribe link. 

You can do so by clicking the button at the very bottom of the email editor:

adding an unsubscribe link

Doing so will provide your prospects with an easy way to opt out from further communications, and potentially decrease your spam rates.

Finding Contact Information

Without a tool like Respona, finding the contact information of dozens or even hundreds of prospects is a nightmare.

However, our tool simplifies the whole process to a fraction of its challenge. 

setting up respona contact search automation

All you have to do is choose the algorithm mode and specify which positions and seniorities your target prospects hold.

For link building, let’s set the algorithm mode to the first one: only find the author of the article if they work for the company, otherwise, find other people at the company.

As for the position field, let’s enter anything that’s related to content, SEO, and content marketing – at all seniority levels. 

To increase our success rates, let’s also enable the email finder to assign company generic emails if no person with our defined criteria was found in the advanced settings. 

Once everything is set, hit “Find contacts”.

Just like the prospecting automation, the contact search automation is done in the cloud, so while it’s running, you may start working on another campaign, for example. 

Depending on the size of your campaign, it may take from a few minutes up to several hours.

Once it’s completed, you can review its results.

assigning emails

Here, you’re free to re-assign contacts or even run additional manual searches by domain, name, and job title.

When all contacts are assigned, it’s time to move on to the final step. 

Personalization

We already have a decent chance of getting a response with our pitch, but we need to add some manual personalization in order to make it really stand out.

For example, we can reference something the prospect has mentioned in the article to imply that we have actually taken the time to read their quality content. 

Of course, this can take a lot of time, especially if you have hundreds of people to reach out to.

This is why Respona comes with a built-in AI that scrapes content for 10 short but important snippets of text that highlight the most important points discussed in the article. 

personalizing pitches in respona

You can simply copy and paste these snippets straight into your pitches.

Once all emails are personalized, run the final pre-launch verifications to make sure none of your messages contain empty variables or placeholders, and you’re not trying to reach out to any recent contacts or ones that are in your unsubscribe list.

final pre-launch verifications

After your campaign is launched, all that’s left for you to do is monitor replies and manage your collaborations.

And to launch more campaigns, of course.

Publish High Quality Content

Content is the backbone of any website, regardless of its niche. 

And yes, even eCommerce websites can benefit from having a robust blog that covers a wide range of topics.

Everyone keeps saying that you need good content to stand out. But what does it actually mean?

The specifics of creating a top-notch article will vary greatly from niche to niche, from topic to topic.

So, we won’t focus on the actual writing part as there’s no be-all-end-all answer to this question, besides trying to be as helpful, informative, and to the point as possible for your readers.

What we will focus on, however, is another important aspect of creating content  – which is keyword research and optimization. 

These terms refer to the process of identifying valuable keywords within your niche, and implementing them throughout your content in a way that maximizes your chances of ranking for these keywords.

There are two types of keywords: short-tail, and long-tail.

The difference between them is simple: short-tail keyphrases consist of up to three words, and typically yield a great monthly search volume. They are also broad. 

An example of a short-tail keyword would be “SEO”.

seo keyword overview
Image source: Semrush

Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, consist of over three words, are much more niche-specific, and yield significantly less monthly search volume. 

An example of a long-tail keyword would be “link building campaign”:

link building campaign keyword overview
Image source: Semrush

In general, it’s much easier to rank for niche-specific long-tail keywords because they are not nearly as competitive as short-tail ones.

However, another thing to consider when planning out your keyword strategy is search intent.

There are four types of search intent:

  • Informational (when a user is looking to learn)
  • Navigational (when a user is looking for a specific page on your site)
  • Commercial (when a user is interested in your product/service)
  • Transactional (when a user is ready to make a purchase)

For every type of search intent, different types of content works best.

For example, blog posts are the best for targeting informational keywords, case studies and reviews are great for commercial keywords, and, of course, service, product, and pricing pages are the natural pick for transactional keywords.

Each type of search intent has search modifiers such as “what is”, “buy”, “pricing”, “location”, and so on, so identifying intent behind certain keywords is simple.

For finding and analyzing keywords, you can use any SEO software with keyword tracking functionality, such as Semrush or Ahrefs.

semrush keyword analysis
Image source: Semrush

Your ideal target keywords should have a low difficulty score, but high search volume. 

However, a healthy keyword profile consists of both long and short-tail keywords for all search intents.

Once you have identified target keywords and created content for them, there is one more step you need to undertake before publishing.

This is keyword optimization (not to be confused with keyword stuffing). 

Just slapping your target keyword in the title tag and meta description of your article as well as mentioning it a few times in the content is not enough. 

Besides your main target keyword, there are many supporting, relevant keywords that need to be included alongside it in a natural manner. 

It’s hard to keep track of all of them manually, so it’s recommended to use a keyword optimization tool like MarketMuse to streamline the process.

using marketmuse
Image source: MarketMuse

Based on the top 10 results for your target keyword, it suggests exactly which of its variations (as well as other relevant keywords) need to be mentioned, and how many times to achieve similar results.

Internal links are important for two reasons.

The first is that they allow for seamless navigation both for users and search engines. This, in turn, helps Google crawl and index your pages in a timely manner.

The second is that internal links also pass on PageRank, or “link juice” within the realm of your domain.

So, if you have old content that already performs well on search engines, you can link from it to your more recent pieces to boost their rankings as well as increase your website Domain Authority.

To optimize your internal link structure, you should strive for what’s known as a “flat” architecture.

flat website architecture
Image source: Backlinko

A flat architecture means that all of your website’s pages are reachable in 3 clicks or less.

This is great for user experience and crawlabiltiy, as Google’s crawlers only have a crawl depth of 3.

This simply means that they are only able to follow three links per crawl. Having deeper internal links than that may cause some of your pages to not get crawled and indexed. 

And if a page is not in Google’s index, it will not show up in search results.

Which brings us to the next section.

Ensure Crawlability and Indexability

You already know what crawlability and indexability are, and how internal links can help you with them.

But interlinking your pages is far from the only step that you can undertake to ensure your pages are crawled and indexed.

The easiest way to get your page on Google’s index is actually to manually submit it yourself.

All you have to do for this is log in to your Google Search Console (not Google Analytics), paste the URL you’d like to index, and request indexing.

requesting page indexing on google search console

This only works for individual pages, so it’s recommended that you go ahead and manually request indexing for each new page you publish.

If you have a large number of unindexed pages that you would like to get indexed in a short amount of time, it’s best to upload a sitemap.

A sitemap is basically an .XML file that lists all of the pages on your domain. 

You can create one manually, or make use of the many free sitemap generators available, such as XML-Sitemaps.com:

xml sitemaps generator
Image source: XML-Sitemaps.com

Once your sitemap is complete, you can upload it to your Google Search Console > Sitemaps.

Once final file that we want to discuss in this section is the robots.txt. 

This is a file that permits or prohibits crawlers from indexing particular pages. 

This is useful, for example, if you have some staging or testing pages on your site that you don’t want publicly available. 

Having unfinished or broken pages can have a detrimental effect on your rankings, and, as a result, your Domain Authority. 

sitemap example
Image source: Google

Creating and uploading a robots.txt file is relatively straightforward. Just follow the steps outlined below.

  • Step 1: Create the File

The first step in creating a robots.txt file is to create the file itself. It should be named “robots.txt” and should be located in the root domain directory of your website. This means that it should be in the same folder as your home page.

If you don’t have a text editor, you can use a simple text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. When you create the file, make sure it is saved as a plain text file.

  • Step 2: Add Your Instructions

Once you have created your robots.txt file, you can add instructions for the web robots. These instructions are written in a specific syntax that is easy to understand.

The most common instructions are “Allow” and “Disallow”. The Allow instruction tells robots which pages to index, while the Disallow instruction tells robots which pages should not be indexed.

For example, if you wanted robots to index all of the pages on your website except for the “contact” page, you could use the following instructions:

Allow: /

Disallow: /contact

This tells robots to index all pages on the website, but to not index the contact page.

You can also use the “Crawl-delay” instruction to control how often robots crawl your website. This is useful for websites that get a lot of traffic, as it can help prevent the server from being overloaded.

  • Step 3: Upload the File

Once you have added your instructions to the robots.txt file, you can upload it to your website.

There are two main ways to upload the file:

1. FTP: You can use an FTP program to connect to your website and upload the file.

2. cPanel: If your website is hosted on a cPanel platform, you can upload the file using the File Manager.

Once the file is uploaded, you should be able to view it in your web browser by visiting your website’s root directory (e.g. http://www.example.com/robots.txt).

We’re referring to both internal and external links audits, referring domain as well as backlink audits.

These allow you to spot broken links and remove them, as well as excessive links to low-quality websites.

At the same time, backlink audits help you identify weak spots in your link building strategy and adjust accordingly.

For example, if you have dozens of links to one blog post but only one or two to another, it may be time to switch your link building priorities around to get more of a ranking boost to pages that actually need it. 

You can spot all of these issues with any SEO tool that features quality backlink auditing capabilities (once again, such as Semrush or Ahrefs).

semrush backlink audit
Image source: Semrush

Semrush, for example, has a very useful toxicity score metric for backlink profiles.

It’s also great at spotting a bad link and even potential PBNs so that you can disavow these links to prevent them from hurting your SEO. 

How do you know if your backlink profile is healthy? 

Your number of new links should always outweigh that of lost ones, and they should be coming from relevant domains. 

Semrush also has an internal link monitor which you can access through Site Audit > Internal Linking.

semrush internal link audit
Image source: Semrush

This report provides you with extensive details on your crawl depth, specific warnings and errors, as well as important notices regarding your internal link profile.

We recommend running quality link audits at least bi-annually. 

Optimize Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals, or page speed, are one of the most important ranking factors in 2024.

A poorly-optimized website is unlikely to rank high in Google search results, and have a high Domain Authority score. 

This especially goes for mobile optimization since Google switched to mobile-first indexing. 

Even if your desktop version is flawless but your mobile is lacking, you may struggle to secure high spots on search results.

Creating a well-performing website comes with a gargantuan amount of work, with hundreds of little things that can go wrong. 

Luckily, tracking these issues isn’t as difficult.

In fact, all you need for it is Google’s free tool, creatively named PageSpeed Insights.

pagespeed insights
Image source: PageSpeed Insights

It tracks your website’s performance both on desktop and mobile, and is able to diagnose its performance issues on the fly. 

It doesn’t just give you a performance score – it points out specific issues which you can then discuss with your developer and SEO teams and solve.

pagespeed highlighting issues
Image source: PageSpeed Insights

A perfect score isn’t always achievable (especially for larger resources), but you should always do your best to at least stay in the “green” zone.

Get Social Signals

Social signals are your shares, likes, retweets, and so on.

social signals example
Image source: Backlinko

If you don’t already have social widgets embedded in to your page that let people quickly like and repost your content, you should get them as soon as possible. 

You should also invest into social media marketing campaigns in order to maximize your exposure on all platforms, and generate as many social signals as you can.

Despite only being loosely related to SEO, social media signals can benefit your rankings, and especially your websites Domain Authority score since they’re part of the algorithm’s calculations.

Link building cheat sheet

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Now Over To You

Hopefully this article has cleared up what Domain Authority is, and how to improve your score. 

With so many SEO activities to take care of, you’re going to need some help.

We recommend doing all of your SEO activities in-house, but if that’s not a possibility, you can resort to investing into SEO services.

As a link building outreach tool, we can take some weight off you and your team’s shoulders.

Don’t hesitate to start your 7-day free trial with Respona to see for yourself!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What factors affect Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is calculated based on hundreds of factors, but the most important are your backlink profile, content, site speed, social signals, and actual rankings for keywords.

What should I do to increase Domain Authority?

Everything that you would normally do to rank on search engines: build links, publish amazing content, and cover all aspects of search engine optimization: on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. 

Does Domain Authority affect rankings?

Domain Authority does not affect rankings, but rankings affect Domain Authority. 

Is Domain Authority more accurate than Domain Rating?

Domain Authority takes into account more factors than Domain Rating, which mostly revolves around a site’s backlink profile. However, neither is more accurate than the other since they’re comparative metrics rather than absolute.

Does Google use Domain Authority?

Google does not use Domain Authority in any way as it’s the proprietary metric developed by Moz.

Ivan Escott

Article by

Ivan Escott

Ivan is the partnerships manager at Respona, the all-in-one PR and link building tool that combines personalization with productivity. Along with creating content, he looks for unique ways to build meaningful relationships with other bloggers.

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