A site’s domain authority is a collection of various site metrics that can help estimate your TrustRank within Google.

Domain authority is a term created by the company Moz. It’s essentially a collection of metrics to help boost your Google TrustRank, a factor that Google uses when determining your SEO ranking. Companies look at domain authority because Google does not disclose the TrustScores that comprise the TrustRank. Keeping track of your domain ranking is the closest thing to tracking your Google TrustScore.

A site’s domain authority combines the number of linking root domains that you have, how many keywords you are ranking on and the percentage of spam that has been detected on your site. These metrics relate to the content you post on your site and the amount of content marketing that you’re doing.

The main goal of search engines is to show the best sites for each search term. They determine the best search results by crawling your site for these metrics to ensure that your business actively talks about the things you do. Search engines also want to determine the legitimacy of links and content on your site.

Linking root domains

The linking root domains metric measures all of the sites linking to your site. These are also known as “backlinks.” There are two sides to obtaining these links. One side is having a lot of linking root domains, and the other side is the domain authority of these sites.

Any site can easily buy linking root domains through shady marketing practices, but the sites linking to them normally have very low domain authorities. If a search engine finds that your site has a very large number of backlinks with low domain authority, your site will be heavily penalized, and it will become much harder to rank anywhere. This is because bad backlinks show the search engine that your site is not trustworthy.

If you go through the due diligence of acquiring linking root domains from websites that have high domain authorities, search engines see that your content marketing is legitimate and trustworthy. This will raise your TrustRank, therefore raising your SEO ranking across your keywords.

Ranking keywords

Another metric that is factored into your domain authority is how many keywords you have that are ranking somewhere between #1 and #100.

Your keyword ranking helps your domain authority, but your domain authority can also improve your keyword ranking. Search engines are very particular about who is ranking on what keyword. Their main goal is to rank trustworthy and legitimate sites, so you should always optimize your content for keywords. More importantly, you should ensure that keywords are naturally and broadly scattered throughout your optimized content.

Real-world examples of domain authority

When you are researching your domain authority, always compare it to competitors in your industry. You can look at your position compared to your competitors in order to see where you need to improve. Let’s look at the domain authority of some of the leaders in search engine optimization.

Although we all wish to have the same domain authority as Google, the reality is that a high domain score takes a lot of effort and time to achieve. Ensuring that your SEO practices are natural and legitimate may not seem like a difficult task, but many companies still struggle with it. The important thing is to get started. Do some research, optimize your keywords and improve your domain authority. That will only help you achieve better SEO and a more successful content marketing program.

Need help?

If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.

This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.