(Part 3 of 3 in our series)

Even Moz says it should be used in context and in conjunction with other tools – check out these ways to get the most from the new Domain Authority.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score, originally developed by Moz, that predicts how well a website is likely to rank on search engine results pages. It is scored on a scale of 1 to 100, with higher scores reflecting a greater ability to rank, and it is calculated by evaluating factors such as linking root domains and total number of links into a single score.

It’s important to be clear about what Domain Authority is not: it is not part of Google’s ranking algorithm, and Google does not use it directly. DA is a third-party predictor of ranking success, not a ranking factor itself — which is exactly why Moz recommends using it in context alongside other metrics, as the case study below illustrates.

Practical Ways to Use Domain Authority

• Benchmark your own domain authority over time to see whether content and link-building work is moving the needle.
• Evaluate link-building prospects — a higher-DA site is generally a more valuable link source, provided its links and topic are also relevant.
• Track your Domain Authority against competitors to gauge how your SEO efforts compare within your niche.
• Use DA in new business conversations to demonstrate SEO value and improvements with data prospects can understand.
• Check the authority of individual pages, not just whole domains, when trying to understand why a competitor outranks a specific page of yours.

Several free and paid tools can check Domain Authority for a single site or in bulk, which is useful when qualifying a long list of link prospects at once. Whichever tool you use, remember Moz’s own guidance: Domain Authority is a relative metric, most useful when compared against your competitors rather than viewed in isolation.

About a month ago, (March 5), Moz updated its Domain Authority (DA) score metric. If you are a marketer who may have not used it too often in the past, now is the time to pay attention. Especially if you create content and run link campaigns, using Domain Authority to help you judge the quality of websites is crucial.

What Moz Recommends

Moz itself says that marketers should use Domain Authority as one tool in their collection. Here is their statement on that:

“First, make sure that you use Domain Authority as a relative metric. Domain Authority is meaningless when it isn’t compared to other sites. What matters isn’t whether your site drops or increases — it’s whether it drops or increases relative to your competitors.”  

So as we mentioned last time, Domain Authority delivers value when you use it in context. What we want to discuss in this post is the idea of relevance. Relevance is really an overarching topic when it comes to digital marketing – it relates to everything we do as marketers. Let’s see how relevance contributes to online marketing success.

Relevance – The Driver of Traffic & Conversions

Being relevant is *one of the most important factors* when creating a digital campaign. It’s the X factor that everyone is looking for. That’s why some ads are more compelling than others. If you see a car commercial that shows someone driving on a rocky road with a powerful looking pickup truck, this may be relevant to you because you work on a farm and you need a tough truck to handle the job. Or maybe you love the feel of soft towels, and when you see a print ad of a white fluffy towel wrapped around someone’s shoulders, you can almost imagine yourself in that photo. There are many ways to execute on relevance, which we’ll get to in a minute; but discovering how to be relevant is an art and a science to itself.

Doing the due diligence to become relevant to your customers is one of the most important tasks you can take on, as a marketer. Via surveys, interviews, usability testing and many more research activities, you can find out what is important to your customers. Once you know what these factors are, you need to find a way to become top of mind with your audience. Enter digital marketing and Domain Authority, which can help you track your success.

How to Use the New Domain Authority in Your Campaigns

Let’s take a look at a sample digital marketing campaign and how DA can help you make key decisions along the way, and help you measure success.

Our client owns a Mexican restaurant in Milwaukee. This is a relatively new business, so she hasn’t had much time to do any online marketing. The owner definitely needs some local SEO work done so her business can rise above some of the entrenched restaurant competitors. The top restaurants in this space are very popular; several have over 1,000 positive Google reviews. Our client has a big hill to climb to become relevant in this niche.

Our job is to provide a highly proactive campaign. First of all, our client is going to need exposure in local media. If we’re unfamiliar with the Milwaukee area, we’ll want to use Domain Authority to assist us with creating a short list of the top local sites that offer restaurant and entertainment reviews (short of the local newspaper). Once Domain Authority tells us which publications we should target (and helps us weed out others – hence using the metric in context, as we stated earlier), we’ll arrange the interviews with a few phone calls. We’re optimistic that our diligence will pay off with the notice we need – local publications often want to be the first to profile up-and-coming entrepreneurs in the community. We will arrange these interviews and ask that the publications link to our client’s website.

Review Link Prospects Using DA & Other Metrics/Tools

Next, we want to build on this local marketing momentum by identifying local websites from which we’d like to request a link. Again, DA can help us sift through the ‘pretenders and contenders’ for our link building campaign. Then we will remember what Moz said – we should use DA as *one* metric, or tool, that we consult. Let’s also look at our link prospects in Majestic and see what we get; are our prospects relevant – will their business or mission mesh well with that of our Mexican restaurant client? If our potential linking websites have super high Domain Authority, we’ll note that this is only one part of the puzzle. If those sites are about building racing car engines, then they are not relevant to our client.

Our search for link candidates will include consulting Majestic; Ahrefs; Domain Authority; the number and quality of links pointing to our prospect sites; the number of unique referring domains and several additional criteria that allow us to find relevant link prospects. The Yoast blog recommends that we create a list of websites that will resonate with our audience (the most relevant websites in our niche that might appeal to our user base). We can reach out to these websites by offering to create content about our client’s restaurant. Our goal will be to get that content published on our prospect sites, or at the very least, to get our client’s URL and a short description listed in directory or resource sections on these websites.

Track Domain Authority of Your Own Site vs. Competitors

So, our local SEO efforts are picking up for our restaurant client, and checking Domain Authority has really helped us. But what about the DA of our client’s site? Moz said we should look at that in conjunction with the Domain Authority of competitor sites. Great idea. We checked our client’s site, and find it has a low score; 30/100. This doesn’t surprise us, as it is a newer website. Three top competitors have DA scores of 60, 55, and 45. So we’ve got an uphill battle on our hands. The good news is we can study these competitor websites and the local Milwaukee Mexican restaurant scene, and come up with some great ideas for creating content that surpasses competitors’ articles and videos on many of the same topics; such as menus, drinks, murals & restaurant decorations, desserts, entrepreneurs’ stories, etc. We want to create irresistible content that is more relevant than what competitors produce. This will require some definite research to get our finger on the pulse of the local market. We’ll use periodic Domain Authority checks to help us measure our progress. We’ll continue to measure our client’s DA score versus that of their competitors. We’ll also keep track of competitors’ link portfolios using Majestic, so we don’t miss any link opportunities we can target for our client.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

See how this works? We integrate Domain Authority into our toolset, so that it becomes a way for us to get even closer to the relevance we want for our client’s website. If we remember that we want to use DA in context, so we can review DA scores against competitors (or in the case of link prospects, competing domains we’re considering), then we’ll get the most out of Moz’s newly updated metric.

SEO Outsourcing Can Help You Benefit from Domain Authority

As we’ve seen, using Domain Authority gives you another great tool to help you build and track your campaigns. Streamline the process by having SEO Outsourcing check DA scores for you, as we create and deploy your campaign. It is one of the services we offer as part of our comprehensive digital marketing services. Contact us today (800-781-3074 strategy@seooutsourcing.com) and get a new competitive edge as we consult and track Domain Authority scores in every phase of your campaign!