With the 21st century well underway, fewer and fewer businesses are operating solely as brick and mortar stores. In this economy, it’s important to have a strong web presence in order to drive your company’s online sales, as well as general marketing of your services and products.
In these situations, it’s crucial that you have a website with a strong ranking across all search engines, since about 40 to 60 billion searches happen on Google alone each month. For your business to succeed, it’s important that you appear in as many of those searches that connect to your services as possible.
How do you do this? By boosting your domain authority, you can begin to see major dividends in your website’s search engine optimization. Here are some things to keep in mind as you embark on this process.
What is domain authority?
Your website’s domain authority is just one of the many factors that search engines consider in their sorting algorithms. However, it might be one of the most important. Generally put, domain authority has to do with how strongly your website ranks in relation to a specific industry or topic.
For example, if you are a boutique shoe store, you may not rank as highly as larger companies that focus on selling shoes. That said, domain authority can still be of help to you, even as a small business owner. That’s because you can also gain domain authority for searches involving specific locations (for example, “shoe store in New York” or “Panama City Beach shoe stores) as well as other differentiators like style, size, or form (“shoe store for hiking boots” or “ethically made sandals”).
Why does domain authority matter?
Domain authority matters because it has a major impact on whether or not your website shows up on the first or second page of a user’s search results. Additionally, domain authority inspires confidence in your buyers and customers. Seeing your business alongside other major companies is a vote of confidence if a customer is new to your brand or product.
How can you check your website’s domain authority?
You may be wondering how to gain insight into how your domain is performing against the competition, and you wouldn’t be alone in that desire. Many business owners have trouble deciphering what their page ranking means, and why they may not be ranked as highly as they’d like.
A DA checker is one of the easiest ways you can diagnose what factors are affecting your website’s search engine results. Many websites offer these services for free, and they can give you a detailed report analyzing what websites are linking to you. This gives you one type of insight into one area you may be able to improve your authority: if only a few websites link to you, your site won’t be thought of as a leader.
How can you boost your domain authority?
One way to start boosting your domain authority is through link building. Improving the quantity, and, most importantly, quality of websites referring traffic to your own is one surefire way to start seeing an uptick in your domain authority. Other ways to boost your domain authority include ensuring that your website is technically on par with the rest of the internet.
Optimizing your website for mobile devices, decreasing how long it takes for your pages to load, and making it easy to integrate your website’s content with social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus all have an impact on your business’ domain authority.
Domain authority is a key factor in how your website shows up in people’s search engine results. While domain authority scores can be confusing and intimidating, with some knowledge and strategy, you can begin to increase your ranking in no time.
