Domain Authority, what is it and why is it important?

Domain authority (DA) is one of the most important metrics for your website. Domain authority determines where your webpage appears within the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Moreover, it is not even a Google metric. Instead, domain authority is a tool provided via by well known services such as SEMRush or Moz.

Domain Authority is one of the most useful tools for measuring your SEO efforts and a good indicator of your website’s performance in relation to your competitors.

What is a domain authority score?

Domain authority measures from 0 to a maximum of 100. Most websites will rarely reach either end of the 0 to 100 range. The higher your domain score (as in closer to 100), the more trustworthy your website is.

What is the average domain authority score?

By knowing the average domain score, the better you can evaluate your SEO progress. Continually working on your DA and page authority (PA) score is important. Every increase you make will help your website stand out in the search engine rankings.

So, what is the average DA score? Typically, most websites will have a score of between 40 to 50.

What about a good domain authority score?

The more trustworthy your website is, the higher your DA score will be. High scoring websites are highly optimised. Additionally, they will have excellent marketing strategies behind them. Plus, the website will have many other high quality websites linking back to it.

A good DA score is anything above 50. Anything over 60 is considered excellent. Even though the score goes up to 100, very few websites will ever reach that maximum. Only big name brands such as Amazon and Facebook will have very high DA scores.

What factors determine my domain authority score?

Many factors determine your DA score, from the quality of your backlinks to your on-page SEO. There are around 40 factors. But, the most important factor is your backlinks.

Google determines trust amongst websites by the quality of the backlinks linking to them. The system used to determine trust, PageRank empathises high quality websites. If you have a backlink on a popular and trusted publisher back to your website, this link will offer more benefit to your DA score than a low quality backlink.

The number of backlinks is also an important factor. Working on steadily increasing your number of backlinks will be a huge help to your DA score. However, don’t make the quantity of backlinks your main focus. As ever with SEO, it is all about quality. Having too many backlinks from low quality or completely unrelated websites can actually damage your efforts and lower your DA score.

Although Google does not use the same system as SEMRush or Moz, it does use similar metrics to determine how expert, authoritative and trustworthy (EAT) your website is.

What about Page Authority (PA)?

When determining your domain authority score with Moz tools, your page authority is also displayed. Many of the same metrics used to determine your DA score is also used to determine your page authority. But, with one clear difference.

Domain authority scores your entire website. Page authority scores a single page on your website.

Knowing what contributes to a high domain authority is important, but knowing what contributes to your page authority also matters. Work upon your underperforming pages to increase their PA. As a result, your entire DA of your website should improve.

So, what is the difference between PA and DA?

Simply put, page authority determines how trustworthy and authoritative a webpage is. Domain authority helps you determine how authoritative and trustworthy your entire website is.

A higher DA score that is higher than your PA score is possible as some pages within your website will not be referred to. It is not necessary for every webpage to have a PA score.

How do I improve these scores?

Essentially, by improving both your on-page SEO and off-page SEO, your DA and PA score should increase quite naturally. The slight caveat to that are search engine algorithm updates which can cause fluctuations in your score. Using best practice and techniques will net you the best results both in the immediate term and over the longer term.

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