What is a good domain authority score?

What is a good domain authority score? We don’t want to bore you with technical words that surround the digital marketing and blogging world but you should know what is a good domain authority score and how to achieve it, and that’s precisely what we be explained in this article.

If you dig around the Internet for a while, you’d probably get lost in bit of content and concepts may come across as complicated, for example, domain authority vs page authority, but fear not!

In the next lines, we will deeply describe what is a good domain authority score, how to increase domain authority, and why it’s important for your blog these days.

So buckle up, and let’s get started exploring “What is a good domain authority score?” And how to improve!

Domain authority: definition

When you design and continuously update a blog, you want people to see your content. To make that possible, you share your webpage with family, coworkers, and friends, you post it on Facebook and Twitter, etc. But what about visitors that find your article on their own?

To attract more traffic, you need to be in the search engines’ first page. But to get there, you not only need good SEO but great and useful content for the readers.

To figure out if your content is good and relevant for these search engines, you should know your Domain Authority score.

So what is a good domain authority score? To put it simply, the DA is a search engine ranking score that helps you predict how good your webpage will rank on result pages; this ranking was developed by Moz, a company based in the USA that offers a wide variety of SEO tools.

The DA goes from 0 to 100; the higher the number, the better your domain authority is.

Let’s show you an example: If you have a cooking site, and your DA is 88, that means your site is relevant for people looking for content about food, recipes, kitchen accessories, etc. Therefore, search engines determine that your page is popular in a particular niche and has more possibilities of appearing in the first search results.

How is my Domain Authority scored?

To calculate your Domain Authority, Moz takes into consideration more than 40 factors, including the prestige of your website (or the authors’ prestige), the quality of the information (if its accurate, well written, evergreen, new and original, etc.), its relation with other sites, and how competitive it can be with other similar sites.

To figure out your DA, simply go to the Moz web page and choose between the Link Explorer, the Keyword Explorer or the Mozbar, paste your URL, and wait for it to analyze the data.

After a few seconds, it will show you your Domain Authority, your Page Authority (which we will explain later), and the page link general metrics.

The calculation of the DA uses a machine learning model to find the most fitting algorithm to closely correlate Moz’s data with rankings in different search engines as a standard.

As mentioned before, a good Domain Authority increases your chances of improving your search engine ranking, however, the higher you score on the DA, the harder it is to outrank it.

Also, something interesting happens between web pages and blogs; for these last ones, is harder to score more than 30 points, so if you notice your blog scores a 12 or a 17 out 100, don’t feel discouraged.

Instead, you can apply the following tips to make your site more relevant for readers and search engines.

How to increase Domain Authority

There isn’t a secret recipe or a definite guide on how to increase Domain Authority, but you can follow some steps to improve your score on certain aspects like the community you want to reach, the quality of your content, inbound links, and others.

Choose the right target

Writing for a specific audience is easier than for a general audience. It’s also a good tactic to improve your SEO, and therefore, your Domain Authority.

Did you know that understanding who you’re writing for makes it easier to find keywords that are actually used by your target group?

If our cooking blog focuses on the interests of mothers, students, fathers, children, Japanese food lovers, or maybe desserts instead of general recipes, we will attract a particular target that’s constant over the time.

We also gain prestige among one of those targets, we no longer are a simple cooking blog, but the cooking blog.

Quality of information

Search engines value the reader’s satisfaction. You not only have to use the right keywords, but also you have to write about stuff that they are actually demanding, and in the way they want it.

Be precise, avoid repeated content because you are not helping anyone by copy-pasting,
Be objective, the public needs an non-biased answer, give your opinion on a matter but don’t make it the ultimate truth
Write something relevant, if you’re writing for Chinese food lovers, it doesn’t make much sense writing a post about Mexican food, does it?
Be evergreen, try to write about things that are interesting and relevant for an extended period of time, instead of a seasonal topic
Choose the right format, mix images and text with videos and tweets, even memes! The goal here is to seduce your audience by all the possible means
If you’re writing a super long post, try to make it interactive. A 2500 words post seem to be the average of the best-ranked articles

Inbound links

Another way to gain prestige on the Internet is to be noticed by similar sites. Are they your competition? Yes, but if you exchange some links between your content, you’ll both benefit from it.

The more links re-direct to your site, the better your online reputation is. However, if you don’t feel comfortable using your competition’s links, you can always ask your partners or distributors to do it.

You can quote other websites that aren’t necessarily your competitors, and then politely ask if they’d do the same.

Other good advice is not to abuse of this practice, search engines reward quality outbound and inbound links, but spamming a whole post with 15 links of the same page is damaging.

Use social media

You’re probably already doing this one, but the more scheduled your social media strategy, the better.

Don’t just sporadically post on Instagram or Facebook, do not mix your personal Twitter with your blog’s, and try to interact with your followers or real target.

You can also use some call to action to encourage others to share your post on their own social media.

Be patient

Everything we have mentioned here is completely doable, but not in a short time.

Also, new sites have it harder than older sites when improving their DA. Brand new pages start with a score of 1. Your site will score higher as you continuously feed your content and, gain presence, credibility, and prestige.

Dedicate a few hours of your weekend to develop a schedule on what would you like to post about the next week, and how to translate that content to social media.

Keep in mind DA is a comparative measure

Basically, the best and easiest way to influence your DA ranking is improving your overall SEO. However, there is something you need to keep in mind: you are not the only one interested in improving a site’s DA, everyone with Internet presence wants to do the same.

Let’s keep using the cooking example, you may rank 88 with the page you have now, but let’s say you want to raise it to 90. It’s going to be harder because you will be competing with hundreds of other cooking sites that are already better ranked, that’s why going up is more difficult when you already have a high score.

Also, you can apply as many modifications as you consider to grow your DA, and sure they will be helpful attracting new readers or clients, but these other pages most likely are also improving their rank.

Since the DA algorithm is based on comparisons with similar sites, if one of those blogs improve, naturally your rank won’t move much and can even decrease.

Domain Authority vs Page Authority

If you have previously looked into DA on the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on the Page Authority concept.

They have more similarities than differences, but they are not the same. Also the strategies to improve are different.

Page Authority is also a ranking system that goes from 0 to 100 and helps you to predict how well a specific page of your site will reach the first place in search engines.

PA, as DA, uses a machine learning model to identify the algorithm that best works with correlations between rankings.

To calculate your PA, you mainly do the same you do to calculate your DA, but to improve it, you have to take a different path.

First of all, do proper keyword research. Correctly place keywords in H1 title, meta-tags, H2, etc.

Then you can focus on the content to do some link building, write about stuff that’s interesting, but also write about something that naturally attracts other writers, so they quote your article without asking them to.

Distribute the posts that already have an excellent PA, link the pages you want to optimize to the ones that are already fine.

Concluding: What is a good domain authority score?

To answer what is a good domain authority score: the rank goes from 0 to 100, of course, the closer you are to 100 the better ranked your site will be but remember that this is a system that compares sites.

What is a good domain authority score? Your webpage may score 90 in the Moz app, but that only tells us that it’s a good site comparatively, not that it will necessarily be the first on the search page.

Wondering how to increase your Domain Authority? We gave you a list of actions you can apply to get a better score, but probably the best advice we can give you is the last one: be patient.

Domain Authority vs Page Authority isn’t really a battle, they are interlaced concepts. You can work on your PA and improve your DA at the same, while the other way around is a bit difficult because it will be like improving a cake from outside to the inside.

So if you want to improve your presence in the digital world, create a strategy. Don’t randomly change things because you think they are useful.

Plan ahead and don’t feel bad if your score doesn’t change as fast as you expected, this is a fierce competition, and even though you don’t reach that impressive 90 score, you are still growing as a blogger and giving original and valuable content to your readers.

If you still are unclear on what is a good domain authority score, feel free to contact us.