What Is eCommerce Domain Authority and How Can I Improve It?

When trying to improving your eCommerce SEO strategy, have you ever though to yourself what is domain authority? In this blog, we cover what it is and what businesses can do to improve their domain authority.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a concept developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). A domain authority score ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores representing a higher chance of rank and lower scores representing a lower chance of rank. Moz evaluates many factors to calculate domain authority, such as linking root domains and the number of total links.

Before diving in, it's important to note that Google does not consider domain authority an important metric when ranking pages; therefore, domain authority scores have no effect on SERPs. To see what Google takes into consideration, we encourage you to check out Google Core Web Vitals, the search engine's latest algorithm update.

How Can I Improve My Domain Authority?

1. Conduct A Competitive Audit

The first step to improving your website's domain authority is to analyze your competition. It's important that you're comparing yourself against the right competitors. Now, you may be wondering how to determine your top competitors.

Using Moz Pro, navigate to the "Analyze A Keyword" tool, or use the "SERP Analysis" feature in the Keyword Explorer. Both tools allow you to input a targeted keyword to see what other websites are also ranking for that specific keyword. If you notice that one website is often ranking for your targeted keywords, that's a sign that they may be a top competitor.

After understanding who your top competitors are, it's important to check that the size of their website, its content and their domain authority are much like yours.

2. Audit Your Link Profile

After scouting out the competition, it's time to analyze your links. It's better for your SEO when you have more followed links in your backlink profile. A backlink profile is essentially a list of all the backlinks to your website. Followed links are crawled by search engines and do not have a "nofollow" tag.

Google prefers backlinks from high-authority websites because they are more trusted. It's more beneficial for you to have a few backlinks from high-authority websites rather than many backlinks from risky/spam websites. Tools like Moz's Link Explorer and SEMrush Backlink Checker are great (and free!) tools to measure the health of your link profile. View all of Groove's favorite SEO tools here.

3. Create Engaging Content

One of the best ways to increase the number of followed links in your backlink profile is to create informative and engaging content that other people want to link to on their websites. Google's algorithm considers engagement metrics such as total traffic, organic traffic bounce rate, return visitors and more when crawling content.

The simplest way to improve these metrics is to create inbound content that your audience wants to see. This will help attract and engage people at every stage of the buyer's journey and also attract other websites that are willing to link back to your content.

If you're unsure what type of content other people are looking for, check your top pages as well as the top pages of your competitors. This information provides valuable insights into the type of content that your target audience is interested in.

4. Check The Status Of Your Top Pages

Review the top pages on your website and make sure they're all active and accessible. If there are certain pages with external links pointing to them, check that they are accessible and not returning a 404 Error. If a 404 Error does occur, you can either fix those pages or redirect the pages that are 404ing to a different link. Be sure that the content within the new link is relevant to the topic of the original link.

Another way to fix to pages with errors is to reach out to the websites that are linking to your broken links. Ask them to update the link with the correct URL; it will help you both out!

5. Earn High-Quality Links

Increase your domain authority score by earning high-quality links for websites and other pages with high authority scores. The skyscraper technique is a great method to follow. It goes back to creating high-quality content that is informative and engaging to your readers. This technique is an eCommerce SEO strategy in which companies find the number one ranking website for a targeted keyword.

The website ranking number one for that keyword likely has a ton of backlinks. The skyscraper technique involves creating content that is more valuable than the number one site. Leverage an SEO tool to compile a list of the sites that have linked to the number one ranking site.

Then, reach out to those sites to request that they replace your competitor's current link with the URL to your more valuable content.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has helped you better understand what domain authority is and how you can improve yours. If you have any questions about driving organic traffic to your website or want to learn more about how Groove's eCommerce SEO services can expand your organic search presence, fill out the form below with any questions or concerns! Our team is happy to help you improve your SEO strategy and drive more organic revenue.