Google takes multiple ranking factors into account to rank each page in search engine results. While it's important to improve your website from a technical perspective and optimize it for the right keywords, it might not work as well if your site lacks authority. Websites that rank well on the SERPs generally have a higher domain authority score.
How does Google define the authority of a website? What is the domain authority score? How can it be improved? You will find answers to these questions below.
What is domain authority?
To understand what domain authority is, 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 measure is determined by SEO tools - domain authority checkers. Domain authority is just the common name for this, although most tools use different terms like site authority, website trust, domain evaluation, or, in the case of SE Ranking, domain trust.
Domain authority verification tools calculate it based on the number of backlinks on a website and the quality of those links. If a lot of websites with high domain authority link to your site and very few spammy websites do, your site will have a good score.
This measure developed by SEO professionals therefore allows you to quickly assess the quality of your backlink profile and compare it to 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, called PageRank, which assesses the authority of a website based on backlinks that point to it. The patent for this system is publicly available, but Google will never say exactly how the system determines the authority of the website.
Domain authority metrics are SERs' best guess about how this Google ranking system works. The exact formula differs from SEO tool to SEO tool, but at the end of the day, most tools give a good approximation of the quality of your backlink profile.
If the domain authority has no influence on your ranking, your backlink profile does. This is not the only thing that influences rankings, but on average, the higher the domain authority of a website, the more links pointing to it, the higher it will rank. This ultimately results in an increase in organic traffic and a reduction in the average cost per lead for inbound marketing.
Chart showing the correlation between trust in the domain and position in the SERPs.
Your goal when it comes to search engine optimization is to create more quality links and to rank higher. 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 key performance indicator for your SEO efforts.
Tips to improve the domain authority of the Webflow site
When it comes to SEO for Webflow sites, you already have a lot of assets in hand. The technical aspect of SEO is just as important as the off-page aspect, and Webflow covers pretty much all of that by default.
Webflow models are optimized to work properly on all platforms. Webflow also provides fast and secure hosting with a global CDN, so your site will comply with Google best practices and load quickly from every corner of the world.
This allows you to not have to manage all of that and allows you to focus more on increasing domain authority.
From a technical point of view, the only thing you need to do is connect your own domain. If you have made your Webflow site work on the free subdomain that is provided to each website, you will need to change it to a new domain.
Buy a domain name that fits your brand, either through Webflow or from GoDaddy or another registrar, and connect it to your website.
The reason is that you are building the authority of the domain you are linking to, and transferring your.webflow.com brand to yourbrand.com takes a lot of effort and is not as effective as creating links to the domain directly.
If you have already done so, here is a guide on how to increase the domain authority of your Webflow site.
Create high quality backlinks
The most important thing you can do for your site's domain authority score is to build a large number of high-quality backlinks. The principle is simple: the more authority the websites that link to yours have, the more authority your website will gain.
The trick is to assess the quality of a potential link source and find a way to get a link from that website.
Sometimes the quality of a website is obvious. For example, big news sites like Forbes or the Washington Post are clearly authoritative from Google's point of view, and getting a link from one of them would be very beneficial for SEO.
For most other websites, you have to rely on a variety of factors. The basic factors are as follows:
- Domain authority
- Traffic
- Relevance
- Unique content
The last two are the easiest to understand and control.
Most backlinks should be relevant to the subject of your website. For example, if your business sells dog collars, the websites that link to your site should be about pets and pet care. If you run a marketing agency, links to your site should come primarily from digital marketing blogs.
It's okay if some links come from unrelated websites, but if they make up the bulk of your backlink profile, it could hurt domain authority.
Links should also be surrounded by unique text. Google could penalize your website if you repost the same article with a link on dozens of websites. So make sure that the websites you get links from don't use duplicate content and that you don't use duplicate content yourself.
You can use a domain authority check tool like the one from SE Ranking to measure your current score. This tool calls this measure “Domain Trust” and calculates it based on the number and quality of links pointing to the site. It can also show these metrics for any website you want to analyze:
- The number of backlinks
- The number of referring domains
- Expected traffic volume by country
- The number of keywords for which the website is ranked
- The average position on the SERP
- Number of pages indexed
- The age of the domain
All of these metrics are important in assessing the overall quality of the website you can get a link to, especially the expected traffic volume. A good ranking for several keywords and good traffic means that Google considers the website to be sufficiently authoritative. Obtaining a link from this site will be beneficial for evaluating your domain and could generate referral traffic.
We've established that you should check the quality of the website before creating links, but how do you find them? There are two methods for this.
First, you can Google “your industry + blog + “write for us” to find websites that publish content for contributors. In general, they allow at least one link to your site from the content you post.
A faster way to find websites that may provide you with a link is to check a competitor using a backlink checker and get a list of the domains that refer to them. Then remove sites that are not relevant to yours and check the domain authority of others.
You can use this list to create links in a variety of ways. Here are the most effective ways to increase domain authority through link building.
Basic links. These are links that you can get with little or no effort from database websites.
- Professional directories
- Review sites
- Event sites
Links obtained through the content. These link building techniques involve creating content for the website you want to get a link to.
- Post guest posts on industry blogs
- Writing a column for a news site or a blog
- Give feedback to journalists on sites like HARO
Advanced link building techniques. These techniques require the expert use of referencing tools and large volumes of contacts.
- Creating broken links
- Insertion into lists of resources or reviews
- Retrieving unlinked mentions
This concludes most of what you can do to increase your site's domain authority. But there are still a few important things to do.
Diversifying the backlink profile
Domain authority depends not only on the quality and number of links, but also on the diversity of links pointing to your website.
It's okay if, in the first couple of months, you only get one type of link, often the ones you create through guest posts. But after a year, it's best to put different types of links together. Besides links from industry blogs, you should have links from directories and social media sites. Join online discussions and post your content on business pages to get these links.
This way, Google understands that your website has a natural presence on the web and that you're not just creating a few links here and there.
The ideal is to have dofollow and nofollow links pointing to several pages.
Optimize pages based on traffic
Some tools include traffic volume in their domain authority assessment. Even if this is not the case with the tool you are using, the end goal of increasing domain authority is to increase rankings and traffic, so this step is essential in any case.
To optimize your page, you will 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 the images. You need to do the keyword research yourself, but Webflow provides the tools you need to automate the addition of keywords to your pages.
It also gives you a tool that can automate the creation of schema tags. Schema is a JSON document that provides Google with more technical information about the page and makes it easier to index it. It can also help introduce SERP functionality such as this navigation.
Navigation links displayed in the SERPs.
Webflow can automate the process of creating these files and add information to your website without you having to intervene.
Webflow automates the creation of structured data for your website.
Focus on creating quality content
Building links by reaching out to websites and creating contributory content for them is a valid tactic, but it requires a lot of research and effort to build links at scale. To create links on a large scale, you need to create content that deserves to be referenced. Ideally, other writers and editors will pick up this content and link to it in their work.
The best types of Webflow SEO content that can get you dozens of links include:
- Extensive guides on a single subject
- The case studies
- Research reports
- Resource pages with sector data
- Interactive tools and widgets
When creating such content, you need to promote it first. Use every channel at your disposal to do so. Include it in your newsletter, post it on social media, and send a link to the content to other editors.
Monitor and reduce bad links
Finally, you should monitor your backlink profile for bad links, as they can hurt your domain's authority. Sometimes your article becomes popular and hundreds of spammy websites steal it and leave internal links to your pages. It also happens that poor quality websites link to hundreds of good websites in an attempt to manipulate domain authority.
Do a monthly check and, if you see an influx of links from websites that seem shady and have very low domain authority, go to Google's disavow tool and disavow those links. This will tell Google not to take them into account and they won't affect your domain authority.
A good domain authority score leads to a good ranking
Domain authority, or domain trust, is a useful metric that allows you to assess the success of your off-page SEO and compare your site to others. By increasing it, you'll get better rankings, more traffic, and ultimately more conversions.
To increase domain authority, create diverse, high-quality links, and disavow low-quality links that appear. Remember to optimize your website and work on on-page SEO factors, as this is one of the components of success on Google.
Try the techniques in this article and measure your SEO metrics with Webflow's SEO tools to see them work for yourself.
