How to Increase a Websites Authority Score
Authority score can be tricky to get a hang of when starting out and depending on what kind of topic and content the website revolves around. If websites have more niche information, something that won’t have a lot of competition, then a higher authority score will be easier to achieve. On the other hand, if there is highly competitive content, take a few extra steps to stand out! Read on to find out the different ways to increase authority score (even if there’s a good amount of competition).
What is an Authority Score?
Authority score was developed by Moz, an SEO company that offers SEO tools and services. Moz has been around since 2004 and helps businesses navigate SEO and content strategies to rank higher on search engines. The authority score is determined by comparing sites with similar content. The higher the authority score ranking, the more valuable the content. The score ranges from 1-100, a higher authority score will also result in a better ranking on SERP(s) meaning the kind of information that is on a site and the kind of content it holds provides valuable information that helps users. Based on other pages and information that comes up with the search can show how well different sites will do compared to each other. Checking the ranking between you and competitors shows the strength of your domain, your authority score doesn’t have to be 100 to be valuable. Check your direct competitors and see how they score, if you have a higher ranking than them, then you have more valuable content. Although this isn’t a metric that can directly help your SERP ranking, domain authority is supposed to help understand the quality of your content versus competitors. This practice is not used by Google, but it is still very helpful and will assist in other parts of a site’s improvements. SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs (businesses that offer SEO tools, and assistance) use this metric to evaluate your content quality, while also offering tools to help. With extra assistance, checking out what improvements can and should be made and how to follow through with the necessary steps is an easier job.
How to Increase Authority Score
Adding High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are really important and can offer more value to a site, but also remember quality over quantity for this tactic as well. Backlinks are important to Google “90% of websites that don’t get any organic traffic don’t have backlinks.” (Ahrefs) So how does a site attain backlinks? Check the top referral sites which are sites that already link to specific pages. Then it makes it easier to broaden the search and look at their competitors. This may make it easier to get backlinks for their pages since similar content will help expand on certain topics, which will also help user experience. The more a website can refer to quality information the more users are able to learn. Referral traffic will add up and increase engagement and users overtime which can lead to a higher conversion rate as well. This update won’t change an authority score overnight but over time it will add up.
Create Link Worthy Content
Make sure that content is consistently published and create content that will make people want to link to the site. This will also boost linking root domains which boosts domain authority. Having trouble with what kind of content to make? Check past content and see what has been popular and what got the most traffic, and pick something that relates. Revamping and updating older posts/ pages to improve content and add more value to it. Updating content will show that the site is a current and important place to get meaningful information from. This will also make it easier to get natural backlinks which will improve the domain authority as well.
Audit the Site and Remove any Bad Links
Having bad links can result in a negative impact on the site. Having spammy websites attached to a site can bring down the credibility as well as domain authority. It can also unfortunately give a penalty from Google which can also cause damage to the authority score. Make sure to make regular audits weeding out the links that have the potential to bring down your credibility. Always check new links to see if they are healthy and aren’t connected to pages that will give a toxic authority score. There are many different SEO tools that can help to identify bad links so they can be removed as fast as possible.
Improve Page Speed
Page Speed is a really important factor in domain authority and impacts the quality of a site quite a bit. Mobile page speed being just as, if not more important than regular web page speed. Google recognizes and rates mobile performance first, so make sure that it is performing quickly and simply. If a site takes too long to load, or if some aspects on the page take too long, the user will move on and hop to another site. Although updating this feature can be a bit harder to make improvements to, it is a really important strategy that should be fixed. It is something that directly impacts the website’s quality and is a simple result of if someone is going to view your page or choose another.
Improve Internal Links
Keep visitors engaged while linking to other pages on your site, by creating topic clusters this is an achievable goal. Groups of pages that all relate to an overarching title or topic are topic clusters and are a helpful way to let users navigate a website and find out more information. Internal links also make it easier for search engines to crawl the website.
Having too many links could result in over-optimizing a site, which will hurt domain authority and ranking. Too many links on a page will raise some flags with search engines, and make a specific page or even a whole site seem spammy and overwhelming. This will also make it harder to crawl for search engines.
Final Thoughts....
After going through these steps make sure to keep in mind that the authority score will not be improved in a day, it takes time for search engines to notice and make updates. Also, these are steps that need to be continued so keep track of the completed steps and make regular updates so that authority score is always moving forward. Make sure to continue to work at it, and never let the site lie unchanged for too long. Sites should remain fresh and have high quality so that you get more traffic and offer a positive user experience. This is a long-term process you have a lot of moving parts to stay relevant. Having an increase in domain authority will increase ranking and offer a boost to site credibility. Domain authority will also drive in more traffic which can lead to a higher engagement rate on the site.