Domain authority is what sets you apart from other players in your respective industry. It’s a metric that indicates the superiority of your site over others and dictates the likelihood of your domain attaining higher search engine rankings.
Having a higher domain authority makes it easier for you to cultivate trust and attract relevant traffic to your site.
When you have high domain authority, people pay heed to what you have to say and consider you a reliable source of information.
This helps you generate traction organically and allows you to capture quality leads for your sales funnel.
However, increasing your website’s domain authority can be a challenge. And if you’ve been on the lookout for effective ways to increase it, here are a few useful tips that can help.
1. Content Relevance
Content is king. It helps you connect with a relevant audience and plays a major role in improving your domain authority.
To stand out from the rest of the crowd and surpass the competition in your respective niche, it’s essential that your content offers better value and relevant insights. This would pave the way for you to get more eyeballs and grow your domain authority.
Along with relevance, you should also consider topical depth when producing your content, as search engines prefer quality over thin content and reward the creators accordingly.
You should also be mindful of how you structure or format your content, as it increases your chances of ranking in the featured snippets and driving more organic traction.
It’s also important to keep your content accurate and fresh, which means that you should audit your content on a periodic basis and incorporate necessary changes to make up for obsolescence.
By doing all these things, you’d be able to maintain the quality of your content, which in turn complements your site’s domain authority.
2. On-Page SEO
Working on your on-page SEO can be a great start to improving your website’s domain authority.
Not only will it help you offer a better experience to your visitors, but it will also make it easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index your content.
You can start off by ensuring that you’ve chosen the right keywords and creating content around them.
Next, you should optimize your pages with respect to your choice of keywords. This includes optimizing your page titles, descriptions, URLs, headings, images, and videos, along with other media elements.
You should also consider leveraging internal linking. It’s a powerful strategy that not only fuels your SEO but also helps you offer a better navigation experience to your visitors.
3. Off-Page SEO
When striving to increase the domain authority of your website, off-page SEO helps you achieve your goals.
Off-page SEO encompasses activities that you do off-site to boost brand awareness and increase your online presence, which in turn fuels your search engine rankings and helps increase your site’s domain authority.
Content marketing, link building, social media marketing, guest posting, podcasting, and video marketing play a major role here, along with other marketing efforts that may help increase your digital PR and positively influence your branded searches.
4. Technical SEO
Your site’s technical SEO not only has a significant impact on its rankings but also affects its domain authority.
To avoid technical SEO issues down the road, it’s important that you’ve got the basics right for your site from the get-go.
You can start by creating a sitemap for your website and submitting it to Google to facilitate the crawling and indexing process. Make sure that search engines are crawling your website by leveraging the robots.txt file.
Also, consider adding structured data schemas to provide necessary information about the respective pages to search engines.
You should also migrate your site to HTTPS using an SSL certificate to improve your website’s security and protect it from any unsolicited or malicious attacks.
Ensure adequate use of hreflang tags for seamless geographical targeting and enable breadcrumbs to classify the site’s hierarchy.
You should also use Search Console and Webmaster Tools to constantly track your website’s performance, and feel free to onboard an expert at your earliest convenience.
5. Load Time
Did you know that 47% of visitors expect their preferred sites to load within 2 seconds?
The load time of your pages has a massive impact on the user experience, which in turn may critically affect your website’s authority.
Poor load time affects a website’s ability to retain visitors and generate leads. When a page takes forever to load, it’s likely for visitors to exit the site immediately and seek other alternatives.
Plus, page speed is an important indicator that influences the search engine rankings of the respective site.
Improving your load time is not as easy as it sounds. There are a variety of technical elements that come into play here and often demand an expert’s touch.
However, you can minimize the possibility of facing load-time issues by being mindful of a few things from the start:
– Install only the necessary plugins.
– Consider upgrading to a dedicated hosting server.
– Keep track of server performance.
– Avoid using heavy images or media.
– Use visual content in moderation.
– Avoid excessive redirects.
– Assess code density.
– Minimize the use of Flash content.
– Solve caching issues.
– Display fewer ads on your pages.
– Fix CDN problems.
6. Mobile Optimization
In order to grow the domain authority of your site, it’s essential to have one that’s mobile-friendly. A mobile-optimized site offers an overall better experience to its visitors. So, it’s a no-brainer that its authority will grow over time.
Nowadays, people are always on the move and prefer having access to information at their fingertips. A mobile-optimized site makes it easier for visitors to get their daily dose of content on the go and access required information hassle-free.
Plus, Google’s mobile-first index favors websites that are optimized for mobile devices and considers mobile friendliness an important ranking factor.
Hence, it’s important to ensure that your website is mobile-responsive and optimized to offer a seamless user experience.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The six useful tips to increase your website’s domain authority. If you’ve been trying to increase your online presence and be at the top of the search results, the recommendations provided may help improve your DA and make it possible for you to outperform your competition.
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Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.