Domain Authority: Is It Worth the Trouble? | Velocity Agency | New Orleans, LA

Having your online marketing efforts be successful in 2014 is a big deal. After all, web users around the globe are expected to drop $1.5 trillion this year on their favorite goods and services online. While you undoubtedly understand that great SEO, content marketing, and social media outreach are essential to your success in tapping into that huge revenue stream, you may not have heard about domain authority. If that is the case, you need to become familiar with the concept to start improving your business.

What is Domain Authority, and How is It Calculated?

To put it simply, your domain authority is a numerical score assigned to your website based on a number of factors. After running these factors through a complex scoring algorithm, your site is assigned a domain authority score out of 100 based on its authority in popular search algorithms, like Google PageRank.

How your domain authority is calculated depends on the service that’s doing the calculation. Generally, checkers will combine your total number of quality back-links, the number of rooted links, and any links your page uses from known authorities on various subjects. Just like popular search engine algorithms, domain authority checkers also take into consideration the relevance of your content and the amount of traffic flooding your site.

You need to keep in mind that your domain authority score has no impact on how you’ll appear in search engines. Instead, it’s an indication of how effective your web marketing efforts are. Why? As you’ve seen, your domain authority is simply a score that’s calculated based on your relevance, back-links, and the like; in other words, it’s completely dependent on the success of your SEO efforts.

Steps to Improve Your Own Domain Authority

Having said that, you might think that there is little value to your domain authority other than its use as a metrics tracking tool. However, you need to consider this: the higher your domain authority, the more likely it is you’ll place high in search engine results. Facebook.com, for instance, has a domain authority score of 100. That means anytime the site publishes a new piece of content, whether it’s an overview of a new app or news on the changes to their privacy policies, it is likely to shoot to the number one spot in Google results, ahead of any other listing resulting from a search for “Facebook.” If you want to improve your domain authority, you should focus on your SEO efforts overall, but there are a few specialized tactics you can take to grow your score:

• Improve Onsite Content

Improving your onsite design, content, and functionality is a sure step toward an improved score. Keeping your interface clean, streamlining your design to improve your loading times, and keeping your links numerous but relevant, a key factor in any domain authority calculation, will go a long way in bringing that score up.

• Combine Content Marketing with Social Media

61% of web users say that content marketing makes them more likely to buy from a company online, which is great for your revenue. However, content marketing can also have an impact on your domain authority. Quite simply, the better quality of content you write, the better chance you have of it being shared across social media, thereby building more links. By building your own presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other popular platforms, you further improve your chances of building these quality links.

Unlike other metrics, your domain authority score cannot easily be improved, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important for you to try. In general, better marketing efforts, whether in your content production team or through social media, will yield a better authority score, and that will go a long way in helping you get noticed online.

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Velocity Agency is a digital marketing and advertising firm specializing in digital and internet marketing & advertising, print, web design, graphic design, film, and HD video promotion and post-production. Velocity serves clients all over the United States from our Metairie, LA office just outside of New Orleans by strategically implementing proprietary tools and techniques to get you the most conversions for your business through lead generation, cost-per-acquisition, and top line revenue.