You most likely heard about domain authority (DA) and you may even know how to measure it and what it means for your business. However, have you ever thought about what actually is a good DA for your website?
Is it 40? Or maybe your 25 DA website is actually pretty good in the grand scheme of things. In this article, we’re going to explore what makes a good DA for your website.
What is domain authority?
For those not in the know, DA is a ranking that identifies the authority or trustworthiness of your website based on the number of links to your website. Though everyone associates this with Google, they do not officially recognise it as a standard of measurement of the power of your website.
Therefore, as a website builds high-quality backlinks, its DA will increase over time. This is why websites such as Wikipedia have an extremely high DA because they have a huge number of backlinks.
To make it simpler, we’ve borrowed some definitions to give you a more holistic view of how people perceive DA.
Domain authority is the term used to describe how highly a website’s content is to rank on Google based upon the domain’s overall quality.
RankXL
Developed by the SEO software company Moz, domain authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts a website’s ability to rank on search engine results pages or SERPs. Domain authority ranges from a score of 1 to 100. The higher your score, the better your website will rank.
Hubspot
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and number of total links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time. Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs.
Moz
What is a good score?
The answer is quite nuanced, but to put it simply, it depends on your industry and how competitive it is, in terms of brands vying for visibility. It is actually difficult to say what is a good or bad domain authority score.
The reason being is that DA is best used as a comparative tool rather than a direct ranking from 1 to 100. Niche industries may struggle to find a lot of backlinks, therefore keeping their DA low – however, comparatively, it might still be a high score for your industry. This also works inversely for more competitive industries where a higher DA score may not mean much in comparison to other players.
In some industries like real estate or the rental market, a domain of around 50 might just be the norm and not very strong. While a domain of 25 or so in the public relations industry can be quite high, search volume in this industry is very low.
How do you increase your domain authority?
We’ve written extensively about this and you can read some of our work here and here.
Alternatively, you can reach us at [email protected] and book a consultation with one of our highly qualified consultants to find out how you can up your content game.
This article has been updated on 10 June 2020