Domain authority is essential to improving your website status.

Domain authority measures how a site is successful in appearing in the search engine results (SERP), compared to competitors. And a lot of people are wondering how to increase the domain authority of their website. In this blog post we will provide you five steps to follow in order to boost your domain authority.

Step 1: Acquire high-quality backlinks from authority sites 

Calculating domain authority is crucial, and backlinks play a vital role in doing so. Ahrefs’s study showed that 55.24% of websites don’t get any organic traffic since they don’t have backlinks. So it’s crucial to have high-quality backlinks. 

There are many ways of getting backlinks to strengthen your link profile. To begin, you can look at your top sources (using such tools as SEMrush or Ahrefs), and then find sites that are similar for backlink opportunities.

You can also use a WordPress analytics plugin that shows you detailed reports on your dashboard to uncover your top link sources inbound. Additionally, you can ethically spy on your competitors, see their backlink sources, and then try to get links from the same websites. 

Step 2: Create killer content that’s link worthy

Authority comes down to two significant areas that help boost your domain authority and the performance of your website in the search engine results. Those areas are:

• Creating excellent content that tightly targets your audience and provides considerable value. Users should like to share your content because it’s catchy, informative, entertaining and beneficial for them. Your content should invite your readers to take actions, such as looking for more information and even hiring your services.

• Promoting content and distributing it to get high quality, and high relevant links back. If you work consistently in these two areas, your domain authority will rise. So when you start, try to look at those two areas and remove as many barriers as possible. Before you begin to add new content, optimize existing content, distribute it and promote. If you go and take this simplified approach, you will achieve results. 

Step 3: Audit your site and remove bad links

Now, there are periphery things that you can do to help remove obstacles to achieving an excellent result for your website. And how you have it structured acts as a massive barrier to making those two components of your content marketing program. The suggestion is to audit your site and remove bad links. 

Bad links are backlinks that lower your site’s reputation on Google. The quality that Google assigns to links can be measured with Google’s algorithms and their link quality analysis. Such links can be considered spam or low-quality. 

Website audit can also tell you whether you have broken links on your website, unoptimized links (usually missing meta information) or website structure at all. 

Step 4: Improve your internal links

You can also focus on your internal links to improve your site’s user experience. An internal link is a reference to another webpage within the same website. For example, visitors can get more engaged and lower the bounce rate if you have links directed to several informative web pages on your site. Some benefits of internal links:

• They help search engine bots to crawl your website more easily, indexing your pages. To help them understand your content and page, SERPs use crawlers to visit your website and gather information, follow all the links, and discover new pages. 
• Internal linking builds the foundation of a website architecture, that is your site’s structure. A proper internal link structure passes link juice from one page to another. 

You can improve your internal link strategy by using an appropriate plugin. “Link juice”, for example, is an SEO term that refers primarily to the value of a web page passed to others. This strategy can give a vote of confidence to the search engine since more links are pointing toward a reliable page show. So internal links contribute to boosting your domain authority.

Step 5: Optimize your website structure and user experience

You should not forget about one of the most critical factors in increasing your domain authority: the structure and user-friendliness of your site. Search engines can crawl your sites more efficiently and index them on search results by using a proper format. 

If you want to improve your site’s user experience, you can begin by focusing on its optimizations for mobile. Google has now implemented mobile-first indexing that will look at how your website performs on mobile. 

Last but not least, make sure your site is safe. Getting an SSL certificate and changing your website to HTTPS can guarantee your secure site. You can also make your site safer by getting hold of the top WordPress security plugins. For instance, Sucuri offers many essential security features similar to a web application firewall.

How long does it take to achieve results?

If you’re starting with a brand new website with no domain authority or domain authority of 5-10 or less, it will take you six months before you start seeing that. 

The number improves steadily.  It’ll take you 12 to 18 months before you start to gather a significant enough domain authority, where you can start competing with your competition on long-tail keyword phrases.

In summary

You should remember that you can’t control your site’s domain authority. However, you can follow all the mentioned steps closely, so your domain authority increases steadily.

You need to keep in mind that increasing your domain authority takes time. Therefore, you should set out a long-term strategy, plan the implementation of all the above strategies, and wait for your domain authority to boost.

The bottom line is that there is no magic bullet for achieving results. It’s all about consistently doing the right thing and removing obstacles that prevent you from doing things right. 

Here, at Tempesta Media we use best proven practices to increase the domain authority of our customers, as a part of a managed service solution. Contact us today if you would like to accelerate your success with managed content marketing