Improving your DA can provide an enormous boost to your company’s visibility and credibility—and it doesn’t always require a lot of heavy lifting.
Businesses want to come across as authoritative and as having expertise in their specific industry when it comes to online content and strategic marketing materials. This can require content creators to perform a tricky balancing act between strengthening content with factual information, statistics, and data, and maintaining the client’s on-page “integrity” by ensuring that data isn’t sourced from a competitor. Many times, I’ve followed multiple linked references to a marketing study or industry-specific research project in order to identify a reference that wouldn’t come across as a conflict of interest—my record so far is following an article from August of 2020 through 10 linked data references to a research statistic that originated from an independent study conducted in 2013.
From these efforts, I’ve learned one major lesson relevant to this piece on domain authority: be thankful for data, research, and standard practices that can be sourced from industry leaders who have such authority in their field, and that they are considered fair game when it comes to referencing their content. Among those I turn to when discussing search engine optimization strategies, Moz is amongst my favorite. And with local SEO performance being an increasingly important metric clients want addressed by the content I write, Moz’s website is a resource that I rely upon for its insight into a client’s domain authority and performance versus their competitors.
What is Domain Authority?
Moz got its start as a blog and online community in 2004. First referred to as SEOmoz, the community was one of the first places where experts in search engine optimization started to share research and their insight into the intricacies of catering to Google’s ever-changing search algorithms. As the scope of the community evolved, so did the services offered by SEOMoz. As they started offering software solutions and tools, the organization rebranded in 2013 as Moz.
Throughout the organization’s evolution, it created a tool that came to be known as Domain Authority. The online browser-based tool provides a ranking score that measures the likelihood that a specific domain will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). In addition to the base domain authority value (a logarithmic scale ranging in value from 0 to 100), the scoring page provides basic information such as how many domains link to your domain, the number of keywords your domain and associated pages rank for within top-ranked positions, and a spam score that tells users a rough percentage of sites seen to have similar features or appearance that have been punished or banned by Google.
How to Compare Your DA Score Against Your Competition
Checking your domain authority score is easy. The service allows you to perform several domain assessments for free to get a feel for how Moz scores domains in your industry. If you’re frugal and you go prepared, you can even check out the domains of several direct competitors before the service requires you to sign up for a trial account that will transition to Moz’s Pro service after 30 days.
The score you received is logarithmic—that is, making improvements at the lower end of the spectrum is going to have a greater and faster impact on your score than if your score is higher. Generally speaking, scores falling between 40-50 are average, 50-60 are good, and sites with a score over 60 are considered leaders.
Whether you’re a veteran business with a website that’s been in operation for years or a startup just getting rolling, you can identify your competition using Google in conjunction with domain authority. Identify the local keywords and service identifiers you’d like to rank in search engines for, and between Google and Moz Pro, you will be able to identify and assess the competition. Which organizations are listed in the Local 3 on results, which brand is featured in the Google Answer Box, and what are those businesses’ domain authority scores on Moz Pro? Once you have established this, you can determine the gap between your own score and your competitors and set about closing that gap.
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How to Improve Your Domain Authority for Local Search
While details are slim on exactly what factors go into establishing your website’s domain authority, much research has gone into determining how to improve the score. Moz itself has provided insight into some of the steps businesses can take to improve their DA, equating the process to essentially improving your site’s overall SEO, with a focus on improving your backlinking.
- Identify the competition using Moz Pro’s keyword analysis and SERP analysis tools. These tools will tell you other sites ranking for target keywords.
- Determine if you have a sufficient amount of active links in your link profile.
- Increase followed links by improving the quality (and then quantity) of your onsite content. Use the Moz Pro Top Pages tools to determine what kind of content your audience wants to read. Use this to also fix any dead links.
- Promote your top pages and content in link-building strategic initiatives.
Improving Your Local SEO One Link At A Time
Moz has provided the marketing community with a number of powerful solutions to some of the most challenging issues we face, but few offer as much insight and value as the domain authority tool that is part of the Moz Pro service. A must-have for professionals concerned with helping clients improve SEO, the domain authority-focused toolset gives crucial insight into your website’s place amongst its competitors and peers alike, helping marketing professionals not only create targeted and on message content, but also maintain the technical side of your SEO by maintaining and building backlinks that are necessary to drive inbound traffic. If you want to find an SEO-savvy vendor who can help your B2B organization navigate the tricky process of improving your local SEO performance and outmaneuver your competitors, then it’s time to start searching UpCity’s marketplace of B2B service providers.