How To Increase Domain Authority Of A Website: 10 Tips
DA stuck, not increasing? You’re probably doing these 10 things wrong! Here’s how to increase domain authority, step-by-step.
In this article, I’ll discuss multiple ways you can use to improve your DA. Don’t worry if you can’t do everything at once. Start with a few methods and build as you go along.
If you’re new to domain authority and thinking ‘’what the heck is it anyway’’ and ‘’how do I even know what my DA is?’’, I’ll go into detail to explain this as well.
Read on for the complete guide on how to increase domain authority.
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How To Increase Domain Authority Of A Website
Any serious blogger or business with a website should be concerned with their DA.
Why?
Because the higher your domain authority, the higher you will appear in search engine rankings.
And if you’re on the first page of Google, you are going to get more people clicking through to your website.
More people reading your posts means the possibility of making more money from your website.
To increase your domain authority will take some perseverance, action, and patience.
If you’re looking to increase the domain authority (DA) of your blog or website, I’m here to share the exact steps, and seo hacks to boost domain authority.
What Exactly Is Domain Authority?
Domain authority was developed by Moz and is like a badge of credibility. The higher your DA, the more trusted your website is by Google.
Domain authority is calculated on a scale of 1-100 and determines the likelihood Google will rank your site in searches for specific terms.
Your website’s DA is calculated by looking at multiple factors. These include linking root domains and total links.
Basically, links to your site are like votes of confidence. The more you have, the higher your site authority will be.
When you are buying an established website, buying a website with a DA higher than 30 may mean an increased likelihood of your future posts ranking high in search results.
But, you can still be successful with a website with a low DA, because there are many things you can do to increase its domain authority.
How Do I Know What My Domain Authority Is?
There are multiple free tools you can use online to check the domain authority of your website.
It’s a good idea to keep a check on your domain authority, to ensure your efforts are moving the number in the right direction.
Also, keep a check on your competitors and strive to surpass their DA scores.
This means when you write similar content, your article has a better chance of ranking higher for relevant keywords people search for.
Here are some recommended free DA check tools available online:
MozBar: You can download and add their extension to your Google Chrome toolbar. This will give you a Moz symbol in the top right of your search bar.
Once signed in, this tool shows you the DA of every site you click on.
SmallSeoTools: This is another simple to use domain authority checker.
Simply type in up to 10 domains at a time and press ‘check authority.’
It will show you; domain authority, page authority, linking root domains and total links.
This information can be used for search engine optimization, to help increase the DA of your website.
ClickMinded DA Checker: This DA checker tool allows you to bulk check up to 50 URLs at one time.
It will show you DA and PA (page authority) and you can even bulk download the CSV files to check each domain later on.
Who Calculates Domain Authority?
Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz.
This score predicts how a website will rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
DA scores range from one to 100 and the higher your website’s score, the more likely your posts will get ranked on the first page of Google.
Moz calculates new DA scores every 4-6 weeks. This is why even when you initially get new backlinks, you may not see your score increase immediately.
For example, in February and March, this website Niche Investor (its previous name is BlogsForSale.co) was featured in Business Insider, CNBC Gow, MSN Money, and many other top publications.
We received many high-quality authority backlinks, but my DA has not gone up yet one month later, and probably won’t show an increase until later in the year. This is normal, we just have to have patience,
How is Domain Authority Determined?
The main factors determining your site’s domain authority is the quality and amount of linking domains.
If you have links from high DA sites of 60+ this will help your ranking much more than having links from lower-ranking sites.
Having high authority sites linking to you, means they pass some of their authority on to you.
The highest domain authority sites (high DA sites), in turn, will have hundreds and sometimes thousands of other sites linking to them.
It’s important to note, however, that domain authority is not the only factor that will affect your website’s rank in the search engines.
Sometimes a lower-ranking site can outrank a higher DA site in the search for a keyword because Google determines the page to be more detailed, relevant and keyword focused.
Here are other factors that affect domain authority;
- Domain age. As a domain ages, it will have more time to build its credibility in a niche.
- The quality and amount of content you produce. Posting regular, quality content allows Google to start seeing you as an authority.
- Shareability of your content on social. Is your content getting shared? Are you sharing it and encouraging others to do the same. Posting an article is not enough, you need to get it out there across your social accounts.
- The relevance of linking domains. Having high DA sites link to your site is like a sign of trust in Google’s eyes. Low DA sites pointing to you will not have the same effect. Use SEMRush to easily conduct a link audit to see who is linking to you and remove any unwanted, spammy sites that could be hurting your DA.
How to Increase Domain Authority Step-By-Step
There are certain activities you can work on each day to increase your site’s domain authority.
Experts say it’s easier to get from 20-30 than it is from 70-80.
Here are the top ways to increase your site’s domain authority, so that you can work towards becoming one of the highest domain authority sites in your niche.
1. Guest Posting
Guest posting is when you write a quality article for another website. Many high DA websites will accept guest posts and allow you to link back to your website either in the body of the text or in the bio.
Some will be ‘dofollow’ links which give your link juice a better boost. Some will be ‘nofollow’ which are not helpful in boosting your DA but are still good to have as they give you and your website more exposure.
You can check with the website owner beforehand to see which you will get.
Aim for a mix of both, allowing you to build up a healthy, natural link profile.
You can search guest posting opportunities in Google by typing; keyword + guest post, keyword + submission guidelines or keyword + contribute an article for example.
Learn how to get the most out of guest posting.
2. Add Your Content to Social Bookmarking Sites
Social bookmarking sites are where bloggers, writers and website owners can submit their content and share others content.
Once your posts are saved to a social bookmarking platform, other users can save your content (bookmark it) to read at a later date.
Not only will your site get a link back from the social bookmarking platform, but your content also gets in front of the eyes of many others.
Some popular bookmarking sites to look at are:
3. Improve Your On-Page SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) should be a massive part of any site’s growth strategy.
Moz suggests you should work on your overall site SEO consistently to help improve your DA.
These are some areas to look at to improve your website SEO:
- Research optimal keywords that have search volume but low competition
- Use variations of your main keywords
- Optimize title tags and image alt tags
- Write click-worthy meta descriptions containing your keyword
- Link to authority websites
- Internally link to your other relevant content
- Make your website easy to navigate with menus and a search bar
- Use the free plugin Yoast SEO which guides you to optimize pages and posts
Enroll in our SEO Foundations course here, for free!
4. Submit Your Site to Directories
This is a bit of an old-school tip, but it has worked for people.
Submitting your site to directories helps to improve your domain authority as you’ll acquire authority backlinks.
Web directories have been around since Google was not even there when people wanted to search for useful resources. Directory submissions are still a useful tactic today, which can help improve your website’s ranking.
Below is a list of free directory websites you can add your site to.
- ActiveSearchResults
- So Much
- Directory World
- All The Websites
- SubmissionWebDirectory
5. Write and Contribute To Epic Round-Up Posts
Writing a roundup post entails you asking influencers a question and putting it all together in an epic roundup post. This can have a huge impact on your domain authority as if you do it well, your roundup post will be shared and read a lot.
Once you have written your roundup post, you can share it with the experts who contributed and they may share it on their social accounts.
If you contribute to a roundup post, you will get a link back to your website. You’ll also get a great amount of exposure with you being positioned as an expert in your niche.
Check out how to write an epic roundup post here and then discover how to make your roundup post successful and profitable here.
6. Add Testimonials to High DA Sites
Everybody loves a testimonial, even big businesses with high domain authorities. Multiple good testimonials will increase brand trust and sales.
Many websites will actually give you a backlink when you write them a testimonial.
And if that site happens to have a DA of 60, 70 or 80+ that will boost your website incredibly.
Have a think about what software and products you use and love. Maybe an email autoresponder, a marketing software, accounting software or a funnel builder tool for example.
Check out their homepage and scroll down to the footer to find out if they have a testimonials section. It may also be worded ‘case studies’ or ‘customer stories’.
Take the time to write an in-depth, glowing testimonial and leave your website link to get a nice backlink from their high DA site.
7. Create and Share Infographics
Infographics are a good way to increase your high-quality backlinks.
If you add stunning, informative infographics to your blog posts, this increases the chance of them getting linked to by other webmasters and being shared on social.
If you do a good job of promoting a post with an infographic in, you may get backlinks without doing anything else.
Another tactic is to reach out to other bloggers in your niche and offer them your infographic or to link to your post with the infographic in.
If the post and infographic is highly relevant and answer a question, it’s likely they’ll want to use your infographic.
Creating and sharing infographics is a popular marketing technique that could get you some high DA backlinks. It also opens up possibilities to build great connections in your niche.
You can create your own infographics for free in Canva. Alternatively, you can reach out to a Fiverr freelancer with your infographic idea and get it made for an affordable price.
Once on the Fiverr platform, type into the search bar ‘’create infographics’’ and you’ll see many freelancers come up offering their infographic services.
8. Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
HARO is a platform for journalists/bloggers and people who want to contribute information for content to be written (source).
It is also a platform used for white-hat link building.
If you want to know how to increase your domain authority, signing up as a blogger and source can help you get backlinks.
As a “source”, you can choose the areas you want to contribute to eg; travel, finance, food, fitness and many more.
Once you’ve chosen your areas of expertise, you’ll be sent requests from content creators who need information for their next article.
If you can answer their question or have knowledge in the area they’re writing about, you send a pitch back along with your bio information and a link to your website.
When the submission date ends, you should hear back if they liked your answer.
After your answer gets published, you’ll have a link back to your website!
As a blogger, you can sign up under the journalist section. When you write an article, send a source request for information to HARO who will then send it out to relevant sources.
You can choose one or multiple sources to work with. After you have written the article, send it out to all your contributing sources who will likely share it across their social accounts.
This may not directly increase your DA, but it will get your content shared and in Google’s eyes that will make your site more trustworthy.
9. Write Long Form, In-Depth Content
Google wants to see well-written content containing substance, facts, and evidence.
Shorter posts generally don’t contain all this and sometimes just try to answer a question quickly, without diving into the nitty-gritty.
If you check out articles that make the first page of Google, you’ll see that the average content length is 1,900 words.
Many are even more epic, going over 10,000 words!
Taking a look at any authority website, you’ll see their content is long-form, super detailed and answers everything you could want to know about a particular topic.
Some example authority websites that create epic content guides are Neil Patel, Income Diary and Matt Woodward.
Long-form, detailed content is good for the reader because they don’t have to look anywhere else for answers. But, it’s also good for your blog as it will keep readers on your site, get them coming back for more as they see you have answers and it will increase the shareability of an article.
And although it takes some manual effort, this is one of the best SEO hacks to boost domain authority in the long run.
10. Absorb The DA Of Other Sites
Did you know that you can give your site a DA boost by taking over the domain authority of another website?
Yes! Simply buy a website with a higher DA than yours, preferably a site that is already ranking for search terms that you want to rank for.
Then move the articles from the site you bought, over to your website. Make sure the URL path for the pages stays the same.
Then, 301/wildcard redirect all of the links from the old site to yours. Within a few days, your site should start absorbing the previous domain’s rankings, and you should see a boost in your DA.
All this can have a positive effect on your domain authority and help your score to climb.
Recommended further reading;
How To Increase Domain Authority Of A Website – Conclusion
As you can see, there’s a lot of work to be done to increase domain authority.
It’s literally an ongoing process to build website domain authority. But as you test strategies out, you’ll find which ones work the best for you.
With some effort, your website could become one of the high domain authority sites in your niche.
What is your experience with increasing your site’s domain authority? Has your score stalled or are you moving in the right direction?