Put simply, Domain Authority (or DA), is a ranking score that has been developed to show how much weight a domain has online. This weight translates to a prediction of how likely your website is to show up in search engine results pages (often abbreviated to SERPs). The scores range from one to 100 – the higher the score, the more weight (or “clout” if you’re Gen Z) your domain has.
Sites like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook all have DA scores in the 90’s. For a local business, you’d be doing well with a DA in the 30’s or 40’s. For a national company, ideally you want to be in the 70’s.
The ranking score is developed by a company called Moz who pioneered the concept of a score. Other domain ranking scores are available, notably Ahref’s Domain Rating. They’re all trying to do the same thing, but Moz’s was the original and thus is generally the most used. Their score is also viewed as less “pay-to-win” than Ahref’s.
What is Domain Authority based on?
Your domain authority score is based on a variety of metrics such as the quality of content on the website, the age of the domain, how often it appears in SERP’s, etc. These metrics are collated and are run through a machine learning model that ingests the metrics, and compares you to others online in the same spaces before giving your score.
How do I find my Domain Authority?
You can find out your domain authority yourself by going direct to Moz. These scores are also baked into the SEO tools we use such as Mangools.
How can I grow my Domain Authority?
As we discussed earlier, your DA is primarily calculated based on the quality of your content, your website’s reputation, and thus, how much you show up in SERP’s. So if you are to increase your DA, you need to build the reputation of your website. With the development of AI, search engines are becoming wise to the old-school SEO “tricks”. These days, the only way to build your website’s reputation is by building up your brand — just like you would off-line.
If you need help with this, or would like to chat through where you are currently, feel free to get in touch, we’d be happy to help! These days, your Domain Authority is only a small part of how to get your website ranking, but is a useful metric to see growth.