What is domain authority? And why should I care?

Do you know your website’s Domain Authority?

If you want to outrank competition in search results, it should be as good or better than your competition. Domain authority (DA) is a ranking measure that basically indicates the trustworthiness of your website. DA plays a significant role in determining how a site ranks in search engine result pages. Read this blog post to learn 3 of the best ways to maintain & improve your site’s Domain Authority.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a ranking measure that indicates the trustworthiness of a website. It frequently plays a significant part in determining how a site ranks in the SERPs. While the numerical values are relative and dependent on a range of factors, sites with a high DA typically have a high number of backlinks from well-known, reliable websites and are frequently mentioned within their domain. While solid SEO practices are necessary, the actual score itself is arbitrary. The DA metric was created by SEO websites as a tool for people to simulate Google’s “trustworthiness.” Depending on where you check your domain authority, you may find vastly different numbers.

How to Check Your Domain Authority

The Moz domain analysis tool is the most common site to check domain authority. It ranks sites from 1 to 100, with a higher score being a higher ranking ability. Moz and similar sites offer SEO toolbars you can download to check your domain authority. Just be sure that if you are comparing two different domains, use the same tool to evaluate each, that way you know you are basing your research off of the same parameters.

Check Your Site’s DA

Keep in mind that checking your domain authority can help you see areas where you need to improve, but this is technically not a metric tracked by Google. This means that simply getting some more backlinks won’t automatically improve your rankings. We just know that backlinking is a factor in Google’s algorithm, and DA is a good way to evaluate the quality of these backlinks. For this reason, you should not only research the DA of you and your competition, but also the DA of sites you earn backlinks from. Earning a backlink from a site with a high domain authority may be more valuable than a site with a low domain authority as you build your backlink strategy.

Conversely, the link received from a low domain authority site might utilize a different keyword, or it may be more in line with your own website’s category, which may also have an impact on rankings. For these reasons, Domain Authority and Backlinks can be very difficult to evaluate and quantify to any meaningful metric. At the end of the day, all we really know is that more backlinks is good, as long as they are not spammy.

What is a Good Domain Authority?

Good domain authorities can range and are constantly changing. The higher the domain authority number, the better the site’s potential ranking will be. For example, if two sites post similar content, the site with the higher domain authority is likely to rank higher in results. However, this doesn’t mean sites with low domain authorities can’t still rank, or even outrank higher DA sites occasionally. Domain authority should be used as a tool to compare your site to competitors in your niche, not as the end-all, be-all of your site’s SEO.

How to Raise Your Domain Authority

If you want to increase your domain authority, concentrate on your SEO. However, since domain authority is primarily correlated with quality backlinks, you should devote the majority of your time to link building.

• Getting more links from authoritative sites
• Focusing on your keyword strategies
• Regularly audit your link profile
• Create engaging content people want to cite

Domain authority is something that takes time to build. If you feel that your score is low, do what you can to improve it, but you will have to wait. Keep building links and creating content, and you will start seeing gradual improvement, both in your SEO rankings and in your domain authority. Building your site’s authority and rank takes time, and many tools are available to help. domain authority is one of those tools. Work to improve your score as you work to build your dispensary’s SEO, and soon you will have a site that ranks well.

3 Tips for Improving Your Site’s Domain Authority

There are lots of factors that go into calculating your overall score, but the most important one is backlinks. But how do you go about getting links to your website from other websites? Here are 3 simple ways:

1. Make awesome content: the best backlinks are earned naturally. If you create valuable resources on your website that offer important information, and then you properly distribute that information through your various marketing channels, chances are someone while find it, use it, and potentially link to it for their readers. For example, one of our dispensary clients was just featured in a Leafly article because we had a blog post on the website that pertained to the topic of Leafly’s article. This backlink happened naturally simply because we were publishing great content on this dispensary’s website. with a link back to a blog post that we published on their site.
2. List your business on directories: websites like yelp, yellow pages, weedmaps, leafly, etc. are easy, low-hanging fruit links that all businesses should take advantage of. Most of these links are “no-follow”, so they won’t have the biggest impact on your Domain Authority, but they do assistance a factor called NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency – which has to do with the level of accuracy of your information as it is aggregated across the web.
3. Guest blogging: reach out to your network and ask if other businesses you work with would feature a blog post written by you. You can tailor the topic to that businesses demographic to improve your chance of getting a yes. Just make sure to put a link to your website in the blog post that you write for them!

Hire us to do this for you! 

When you hire CannaPlanners to manage your SEO strategy, we employ each one of these strategies for you! Fill out the quick form below and we’ll reach out with pricing and next steps ASAP.