Google takes several ranking factors into account when listing each page in search engine results. While it s important to improve your website from a technical point of view and optimize it for the right keywords, this may not be as effective if your site lacks authority. Websites that rank high in the SERP generally have a higher domain authority score.
So how does Google define website authority? What is the domain authority score? How can it be improved? You ll find the answers to these questions below.
What is domain authority?
To understand domain authority, let s start with what it isn t: a ranking factor. Google doesn t use it in its ranking systems, and the company doesn t use the term itself.
This metric is determined by SEO tools - domain authority checkers. Domain authority is just the common name for it, although most tools use different terms like site authority, website trust, domain rating or, in the case of SE Ranking, domain trust.
Domain authority checkers calculate it based on the number of backlinks a website has and the quality of those backlinks. If many websites with high domain authority link to your site and very few spammy sites do, your site will score well.
This metric, developed by SEO professionals, enables you to quickly assess the quality of your backlink profile and compare it with that of your competitors.
Why is domain authority important?
Why is domain authority important if it s not a ranking factor but a measure of link building efforts? The reason is that Google has a similar system that evaluates the authority of websites based on the backlinks pointing to them, called PageRank. The patent for this system is publicly available, but Google will never reveal exactly how the system determines a website s authority.
Domain authority metrics are SEOs best guess at how Google s ranking system works. The exact formula differs from one SEO tool to another, but in the end, most tools show a fairly accurate approximation of the quality of your backlink profile.
Although domain authority metrics don t directly influence your rankings, your backlink profile does. It s not the only thing that influences rankings, but on average, the higher a website s domain rating, the more links pointing to it, the higher it will rank. This ultimately leads to more organic traffic and a reduction in the average cost per lead of inbound marketing.
Your SEO goal is to create more quality links and achieve higher rankings. Domain authority is a metric that measures exactly that. Increasing it would be a good indicator of off-page SEO and can serve as a measurable KPI for your SEO efforts.
Tips for improving Webflow domain authority
When it comes to SEO for Webflow sites, you already have a lot in your favor. The technical side of SEO is just as important as the off-page side, and Webflow pretty much covers that by default.
Webflow templates are optimized to work well on all platforms. Webflow also offers fast, secure hosting with a global CDN, so your site will comply with Google s best practices and load quickly from anywhere in the world.
This frees you from the time you would have spent managing all this, and you can work harder on increasing domain authority.
The only thing you ll need to do from a technical point of view is to connect your own domain. If you ve been using your Webflow site on the free sub-domain allocated to each site, you ll need to change it to a new domain.
Buy a suitable domain name that matches your brand, either via Webflow, GoDaddy or another registrar, and connect it to your site.
The reason is that you re building the domain authority of the domain you re connecting to, and transferring yourbrand.webflow.com to yourbrand.com takes a lot of effort and isn t as efficient as linking to the domain directly.
If you ve already done this, here s a guide on how to increase your Webflow site s domain authority.
Building high-quality backlinks
The most important thing you can do for your site s domain authority score is to create lots of high-quality backlinks. The principle is quite simple: the more sites with authority that link to yours, the more authority your site will gain.
The trick here is to assess the quality of a potential link source and find a way to get a link from that site.
Sometimes, the quality of a site is obvious. For example, big news sites like Forbes or The Washington Post are obviously authoritative from Google s point of view, and getting a link from one of them would be great for SEO.
For most other sites, you need to rely on a variety of factors. The basic factors are :
- Domain authority
- Relevance
- Uniqueness
The last two are the easiest to understand and control.
Most backlinks should be relevant to what your site is about. For example, if your company sells dog collars, the sites pointing to yours should revolve around pets and pet care. If you run a marketing agency, the links pointing to it should mainly come from digital marketing blogs.
It s acceptable for some links to come from unrelated sites, but if they make up the majority of your backlink profile, it could hurt domain authority.
Links should also be surrounded by unique text. Google could penalize your site if you republish the same article with a link on dozens of sites. So make sure the sites you link to don t use duplicate content, and that you don t use it yourself.
You can use a domain authority checker like SE Ranking s to measure your current score. This tool calls this metric Domain Trust and calculates it based on the number and quality of links pointing to the site. It can also display these metrics for any site you wish to analyze:
- Number of backlinks
- Number of referring domains
- Projected traffic volume by country
- Number of keywords for which the site ranks
- Average SERP position
- Number of indexed pages
- Domain age
All these metrics are important for assessing the overall quality of the site from which you can obtain a link, especially the projected traffic figures. Ranking well for several keywords and receiving decent traffic means that Google considers the site authoritative enough. Getting a link from it will benefit your domain rating and could generate referral traffic.
We ve established that you need to check the quality of the site before building links, but how do you find them? There are two ways of doing this.
First, you can google "your industry + blog" to find sites that publish contributor content. They ll usually allow at least one link to your site from the content you publish.
A quicker way to find sites that might give you a link is to check out a competitor with a backlink-checking tool and get a list of domains that link to them. Then delete the sites that aren t relevant to yours and check the rest for domain authority.
You can use this list to create links in a variety of ways. Here are the most effective ways of increasing domain authority through link building.
Basic links
These are links you can get with little or no effort from database sites.
- Company directories
- Review sites
- Event sites
Content-based links
These link-building techniques revolve around creating content for the site you want to link to.
- Guest posting on industry blogs
- Writing a column for a news site or blog
- Giving feedback to journalists on sites like HARO
Advanced link building techniques
These techniques require expert use of SEO tools and high volumes of awareness.
- Creation of broken links
- Inclusion in resource or review lists
- Recovery of unrelated mentions
That concludes the main part of what you can do to increase your site s domain authority. But there are still a few important things you can do.
Diversify your backlink profile
Domain authority is based not only on the quality and number of links, but also on the diversity of the links pointing to your website.
It s acceptable that
In the first few months, you only get one type of link, often those you build through guest articles. But after a year, it s better to collect different types of links. In addition to links from industry blogs, you should have links from directories and social media sites. Participate in online discussions and publish your content on company pages to get these links.
This way, Google understands that your website has a natural web presence and that you re not just creating a few links here and there.
Ideally, you want to have both dofollow and nofollow links pointing to multiple pages.
Focus on creating quality content
Building links by contacting websites and creating content for them is a valid tactic, but it requires a lot of research and effort to build links on a large scale. To build links on a large scale, create content worth linking to. Ideally, other writers and editors will pick up on this content and reference it in their work.
The best types of SEO content for Webflow likely to earn you dozens of links are :
- Comprehensive guides on a single topic
- Case studies
- Research reports
- Resource pages with industry data
- Interactive tools and widgets
When you create content of this kind, you ll need to promote it quite intensively at first. Use all the channels at your disposal for this. Include it in your newsletter, publish it on social networks and contact other publishers with a link to the content.
Optimize pages for traffic
Some tools include the amount of traffic in their evaluation of domain authority. Even if this isn t the case with the tool you re using, the ultimate aim of increasing domain authority is to improve rankings and traffic, so this step is essential in all cases.
To optimize your page, you need to include the keywords for which it should appear in the body of the page, in SEO tags such as the title tag, the meta description tag and in the alt tags of images. You need to do your own keyword research, but Webflow provides tools to automate the addition of keywords to your pages.
It also offers a tool that can automate the creation of schema markup. A schema is a JSON document that provides Google with additional technical information about the page and helps it to be indexed. It can also help introduce SERP functionality such as navigation.
Webflow can automate the process of creating these files and add information to your website without your intervention.
Monitor and reduce bad links
Finally, you should monitor your backlink profile for bad links, as they can lower your domain authority. Sometimes, your article will become popular and hundreds of spam websites will steal it and leave internal links to your pages. Sometimes, low-quality spam websites will link to hundreds of good websites in an attempt to manipulate domain authority.
Do a monthly check and, if you find an influx of links from dubious websites with very low domain authority, use Google s disavow tool to disavow these links. This will tell Google to disregard them, and they won t affect your domain authority.
A good domain authority score leads to good rankings
Domain authority, or domain trust, is a useful metric that allows you to measure the success of your off-page SEO and compare your site to others. Increasing it will lead to higher rankings, more traffic and ultimately more conversions.
To increase domain authority, build high-quality, diversified links, and disavow any bad links that appear. Don t forget to optimize your website and work on on-page SEO factors, as this is one of the components of success on Google.
Try out the techniques in this article and measure your key SEO metrics with Webflow s SEO tools to see the results for yourself.
