7 Best Tips to Improve the Domain Authority of Your WordPress Site

If you’re looking to improve your website’s reach and click-through rate, consider investing in its domain authority. A site’s Domain Authority (DA) determines the likelihood your content will rank high in the organic search results.

Domain Authority is measured on a 100-point scale. Different sources will have different ideas on what ranges are poor and excellent. Everyone agrees, though the higher your DA, the better. With that top of mind, here are seven ways to improve domain authority for your site.

1. Craft linkable content

A huge factor in a site’s DA is its number of referring domains. Referring domains are websites linking to your site. The more referring domains a website has, the higher your DA.

Think of referring domains as the number of people saying that the ice cream place across the street is “really good.” When you think about it, you create linkable content when you publish content that people read, like, and share. You have to write in a way that speaks to writers and industry experts alike. Here’s how you can create linkable content:

• Ensure proper grammar
• Write in a tone that resonates with that blog’s audience.
• Whatever topic you’re writing, always fact-check your statements.
• Use images and graphs to deliver your blog’s ideas more effectively.
• Present actionable ideas and statements.
• Have an editor edit and proofread your content before publishing it.

Not only would more websites refer to your blog, but creating quality blog content optimized for SEO should increase its shareability on social media. That allows your blog to reach a wider audience.

2. Get quality backlinks

The type of link you get has a huge impact on your DA. To oversimplify things, getting a link from spammy sites with a low DA will not have much impact on your authority. Getting links from spammy irrelevant sites may hurt your DA.

Source: WaveVideo

You can’t control who links to our sites. But you can work on acquiring links from authority domains. One surefire way you can build quality backlinks from authority sites is through guest posting, which is the process of writing content for another website and including backlinks to your site in the content.

You want to guest blog for websites that have these attributes:

• A high DA. You can discover high DA websites using DA checking tools developed by Moz and other SEO tools that use DA.
• High trust flow. Trust flow is a rating of how trustworthy a site is based on the quality of referring domains. Majestic SEO introduced this metric in 2012.
• High traffic.
• Relevance to your niche.

Once you’ve created a list of target websites for your guest posts, you may use cold email templates to write outreach emails and content pitches to site editors. Sharing some examples of articles you’ve written to editors will help you land suitable opportunities.

The more referring domains your site has from reputable sites, the quicker your website’s DA will improve. That increases your site’s chance of appearing on the first page of Google search results for your target keywords.

3. Increase internal links

Internal linking is a great way to improve Page Authority, increasing the chance of pages ranking for target keywords. The best way to interlink is to first categorise your content. You should then link between thematically related articles.

Note To Editor: I made this image

You want a pyramid of interlinked content. At the top of the pyramid you have your pillar page.

When you create a structure of pillar posts supported by related content that is all interlinked, you spread page authority across the site. Here’s how you can build internal backlinks:

• Before writing, plot out the topics you’re planning to write. Organize those topics by category, then connect them – literally. Draw a line to show links between articles. I recommend creating groups of no more than seven pages.
• Each time you write a new blog post around a keywords, edit some of your existing blogs to link to that new blog using relevant anchor text. For example, your new blog is about “how to use images on your website”. You then add links using appropriate anchor text like, “images on your website”, pointing to the new content.

Spreading link equity by internal linking will increase the page authority of your pages, resulting in higher search rankings. That will over time translate into a higher DA.

4. Improve page speed

Search engines crawl through billions of sites. Site speed is an important ranking factor. The reason is straightforward; people searching online are impatient. If a site takes a long time to load, they will leave your site and go to another resource.

If your content doesn’t rank in the SERP ranking, you won’t improve your DA.

Here’s how to improve your page speed:

• Check your site’s load speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
• Upgrade your web hosting. That will improve the load times of your website.
• Reduce the number of HTTP requests on your site. More requests mean longer load times.
• Reduce the files on a page. Loading more files will mean more HTTP requests, leading to longer page load times.
• Compress your images and videos. Smaller file sizes allow your website to load faster.

Improving your page speed will decrease the bounce rate and improve the user experience. As more people visit your site, your DA will improve.

5. Become an authority in your field

One of the best ways to rank on Google is to create a great blog that’s a resource for people in your niche. A search engine like Google is more likely to let your content rank if the content you produce has proven to provide value to people making a search online. This is something they emphasized in the recent Google Helpful Content update.

It’s harder to create that authority if you bounce between industries such as health, gaming, and cosmetics. Here are examples of authority websites in their given fields:

• Healthline - health and wellness
• IGN - gaming and movies
• Business Insider - business and entrepreneurship
• Hubspot - digital marketing
• Search Engine Journal - SEO

Focusing on a single niche will also make the most efficient use of your content team. Spreading yourself thin across different means mastering lots of different fields. It’s something that’s difficult to accomplish.

6. Make it mobile-friendly

A mobile-friendly website is also a factor for domain authority and SEO. With 90% of internet users owning mobile phones, you need to consider the mobile experience for your website.

Note for editor: I pieced this together myself

It’s straightforward nowadays to build a website that’s mobile-friendly. Most modular website builders have responsive themes that automatically resize website elements to fit different device screen sizes. 

When designing a website, you should always keep the following in mind:

• Test the website across various devices to ensure you provide a great user experience.
• Compress your files so that your website doesn’t use a lot of mobile data.
• Adapt the content for different devices. You might choose to omit certain sections of a page on mobile, but provide that content on desktop, for example.

If your site looks messy and cluttered on mobile, it will leave a bad user experience. That will impact how long people visit the site and if they even return.

7. Increase social engagement

Generating engagement on social media is one of the best ways of making your content go viral. The more people see your content, the more likely you are to get links from authority sites.

Here are some various ways to increase social engagement:

• Respond to comments on your blog. You want to engage your fans.
• Share content on your company’s social media.
• Share your blog on community forums and groups. Sites like Reddit and Quora can be a great source of traffic.
• Share your content via email newsletters. Your email list contains your most engaged audience.

Let’s get this clear: social media shares have no direct impact on your SEO. However, the more people share links to your blog, the more website traffic it will generate. More visitors can result in increased branded search, which is an important ranking signal, and more organic backlinks.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t just about creating good content or making the articles you produce more engaging. You need to provide a great user experience, and generate those valuable backlinks. One way of assessing your success is tracking your DA.

Start with a clear content marketing plan. You want to create a blog that’s a great resource for people in your niche.

To improve your DA, build links to your content. To do that you should craft linkable content and get quality backlinks from authority sites via guest blogging. Build internal links to spread page authority across your domain too.

Optimizing your site can also indirectly improve your DA. Actions you can take include improving your page speed and making your domain mobile-friendly. Share your content on social media and via other channels like email marketing. Follow these steps, and you’ll achieve a better domain authority in no time. Soon, your blogs will rank higher on SERPs.