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What is Domain Authority? Key Insights & Tips to Improve Your Score
- Mike Dodgson
- Jul 29
- 15 min read
Ever heard of Domain Authority (DA)? It's a score created by the team at Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engines. It’s not an official Google ranking factor, but it’s a brilliant way to size up a site's overall strength.
Think of it like a website's reputation score, graded from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the stronger its ranking potential.
What Is Domain Authority? A Clear Explanation
Let's use an analogy. Imagine two new cafés open on your local high street. The first one is a complete unknown. The second has been praised by well-known food bloggers and has fantastic reviews from trusted local critics. Which one are you more likely to try first? Probably the second one, right? It has more "street cred."
That is how Domain Authority works for websites. It’s a metric that gives you a quick snapshot of a site's credibility and authority online, helping you predict how it might stack up against the competition in search results.
Understanding The DA Score
DA is calculated on a 100-point logarithmic scale. What does that mean? In simple terms, it's much easier to jump from a score of 10 to 20 than it is to climb from 70 to 80. Every point becomes a steeper climb.
Every new website starts its journey with a DA score of 1. At the other end of the spectrum, you have global powerhouses like Google or the BBC, with scores well into the high 90s, thanks to millions of high-quality backlinks. The score is primarily driven by the number and quality of sites linking to you.
Key Takeaway: Domain Authority is a comparative tool. Its real value is not about hitting an arbitrary number but about seeing how you measure up against your direct competitors.
What Is A Good Score For A UK Business?
What's a realistic target for a business here in the UK? A "good" score is all relative to your industry. For most UK businesses, a DA between 30 and 50 is a solid achievement.
To give you a better idea of what these numbers mean in practice, here's a general breakdown.
Domain Authority Score Ranges Explained
DA Score Range | What It Means |
|---|---|
Below 30 | This is typical for new websites or small businesses with a limited online footprint and few backlinks. |
30 - 40 | A decent score. These sites are starting to build some authority but still have room to grow. |
40 - 50 | Considered average to good. These websites likely have a fair number of quality links and are established. |
50 - 60 | A strong score. Sites in this range are often well-regarded authorities in their niche. |
Above 60 | This is excellent territory. These are typically major national or international brands with a huge backlink profile. |
Sites in competitive UK markets, like finance or e-commerce, often need a DA of 60+ to compete at the top, reflecting their powerful backlink profiles. As you can see from the table, a DA between 40 and 50 is considered pretty average, 50 to 60 is good, and anything over 60 is excellent. If you want to dig deeper into the technicals, some detailed industry guides can offer more insight.
Your DA score provides a benchmark. It helps you understand your current standing in the market and shapes a smarter, more effective SEO strategy.
How Domain Authority Is Actually Calculated
You know what Domain Authority is, but the real mystery is how that score is worked out. Moz, the company behind DA, uses a sophisticated machine learning model that crunches data from over 40 different factors to predict how well a website will rank. While they keep the exact recipe under lock and key, we know what the most important ingredients are.
At its core, Domain Authority is all about one thing: your website’s backlink profile. Think of every link pointing to your site as a vote of confidence. The more votes you get, and the more authoritative those voters are, the stronger your site appears.
The Power of Linking Root Domains
One of the most critical parts of the calculation is the number of unique linking root domains. In simple terms, this is about getting links from as many different websites as possible.
Let's say you get 100 links. If all 100 come from the same website, Moz sees that as just one linking root domain. Now, imagine you only get 10 links, but each one is from a completely different website. In Moz's eyes, this is far more valuable. It shows that your site is being vouched for by a diverse group, not just one overly enthusiastic fan.
This diagram helps visualize how different elements come together to create your score.
As you can see, while other signals matter, your backlink profile is overwhelmingly the main driver of your Domain Authority score.
Quality Over Quantity: The MozTrust and MozRank Connection
Not all links are created equal. This is where two other concepts, MozRank and MozTrust, come into the picture. They help the algorithm figure out the quality of your backlinks.
MozRank: This metric looks at the popularity of the pages linking to you. A link from a high-traffic page on a big, well-known site carries a lot more weight than a link from some brand-new, obscure blog. It's the difference between a recommendation from a famous industry expert and one from a total stranger.
MozTrust: This measures how trustworthy the sites linking to you are. It’s based on the idea that trust is passed from one site to another. If you earn a link from a highly trusted source, like a university (.ac.uk) or government (.gov.uk) website, a little bit of that trust rubs off on you, boosting your own site's credibility.
Together, these metrics make the algorithm prioritize high-quality, authoritative links over a mountain of spammy or low-value ones.
A single backlink from a globally recognized news site like The Guardian (DA 95) is infinitely more valuable than hundreds of links from newly created, low-authority blogs.
The Logarithmic Scale Revisited
Remember how we mentioned Domain Authority is measured on a logarithmic scale? This is critical for setting realistic goals. The effort required to increase your score grows exponentially the higher you climb.
Going from DA 10 to 20 is a manageable goal. With some focused effort over a few months to get a handful of decent links, you can probably get there.
Going from DA 70 to 80 is a monumental achievement. This requires earning thousands of top-tier backlinks from a huge variety of authoritative sites. It’s a feat that can take years of consistent, world-class SEO work.
This system means progress naturally slows down as your site gets bigger and better. Improving your DA is a marathon, not a sprint. Understanding this from the start will help you build a sustainable, long-term strategy for strengthening your site and your ability to compete for those top spots in search results.
Why Domain Authority Matters for Your SEO Strategy
We know what Domain Authority is and how it’s calculated, but why should you care about it? The simple answer is that DA is your competitive yardstick. It’s a practical way to see how your website stacks up against everyone else in your industry.
Think of it like checking the league table in football. Knowing your position helps you understand who you're competing against, who's way ahead, and which teams you have a realistic chance of overtaking. In the digital world, DA gives you that same snapshot, showing you exactly where you stand.
Setting Realistic SEO Goals
One of the best uses for Domain Authority is setting SEO goals you can actually hit. Let's be honest: if your website has a DA of 25, trying to outrank a huge national retailer with a DA of 85 for a top keyword is probably a lost cause. They simply have too much of a head start.
A much smarter approach is to use DA to find your real rivals—the competitors with similar or slightly higher scores. Focusing your energy on outranking them is a strategic and achievable goal. This helps you put your time and budget where it counts, targeting keywords and opportunities where you genuinely stand a chance.
Evaluating Link Building Opportunities
Building high-quality backlinks is a cornerstone of good SEO, and Domain Authority is your secret weapon here. When you’re prospecting for sites to link back to you, their DA score is a quick and dirty way to judge their value.
A link from a website with a high DA (say, 60+) is massively more powerful than one from a site with a low DA (like 15). By focusing your outreach on high-authority, relevant websites, you make every link you earn work that much harder for you.
For example: Imagine you run a local plumbing business with a DA of 22. You get two backlink offers. One is from a local community blog (DA 18). The other is from a respected national home improvement magazine (DA 55). Both are relevant, but that link from the high-DA magazine will give your own site’s authority a much bigger boost.
Informing Your Content and Digital PR Strategy
Your DA score should also shape your content and digital PR strategy. If your authority is on the lower side, you need to create content that naturally earns links from stronger websites. Think original research, comprehensive how-to guides, or unique free tools that people can't help but share.
For an online shop, a strong DA can directly impact product page rankings and sales. Our guide on SEO for e-commerce digs deeper into how authority plays into a wider sales strategy.
When you start mastering your digital marketing content strategy, you'll see DA as one piece of the bigger picture—helping you build a solid plan to grow your online presence and compete effectively.
Practical Ways to Improve Your Domain Authority
Let's be clear from the start: improving your Domain Authority score is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s the result of a long-term, dedicated effort to make your website better, more credible, and a genuine authority in its field. The good news? The same strategies that boost your DA are also fantastic for your overall SEO, so you’re getting two birds with one stone.
At its core, lifting your DA is all about earning high-quality backlinks. Think of every link from a relevant, respected website as a vote of confidence. It's another site telling search engines, "Hey, this content is the real deal—it's trustworthy and valuable."
Develop Link-Worthy Content
The most organic and sustainable way to get those precious backlinks is by creating content that people genuinely want to link to. Your average, run-of-the-mill blog post simply won’t cut it. You need to create assets that truly stand out from the crowd.
What kind of content gets people linking?
Original Research and Data: Go the extra mile. Run a survey, analyze some unique industry data, or publish your own findings. Journalists and bloggers are always hungry for fresh statistics to cite, making this a surefire way to attract powerful links.
In-depth Guides and Tutorials: Aim to create the single best, most practical resource on a topic within your niche. When you have the definitive guide, it naturally becomes the go-to reference for everyone else.
Free Tools and Templates: A simple calculator, a handy checklist, or a well-designed template that solves a real problem for your audience can become an absolute link magnet over time.
Strengthen Your On-Page and Technical SEO
Your website's technical health is the foundation everything else is built on. It doesn't matter how incredible your content is if your site is slow, a nightmare to navigate, or full of broken links. These on-page and technical elements are critical for how both people and search engines perceive your website's quality.
Getting these fundamentals right is one of the most important things you can do. For a complete picture of what goes into strong search performance, it's worth exploring the core SEO ranking factors for 2025.
Here are the key areas you need to nail:
Site Speed: A snappy, fast-loading site makes for a happy user, which in turn makes search engines happy.
Mobile-Friendliness: With so much traffic coming from phones, your site must look great and be easy to use on any screen size.
Clear Site Structure: A logical site layout helps search engine crawlers understand and index your content efficiently. It also helps your human visitors find exactly what they’re looking for.
Optimised Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: These are your sales pitch in the search results. Make them clear and compelling to earn that click.
Key Insight: Think of strong technical SEO as the launchpad for your authority-building mission. Without a solid platform, even the most brilliant content and outreach efforts will struggle to take off.
Conduct Strategic Link Building
While fantastic content can attract links all by itself, you'll often need to be a bit more proactive to get the ball rolling. This means actively going out and building relationships to acquire links from other reputable websites in your space.
A key part of raising your Domain Authority involves a focused effort on earning high authority links. It's not just about getting any link; it's about securing endorsements from credible, relevant sources. This often means reaching out, promoting your best content, and showing other site owners why linking to you provides value to their audience.
Guest blogging is another classic and effective tactic. By contributing a genuinely helpful and well-written article to another respected blog, you can tap into a new audience and earn a valuable backlink at the same time.
Here's a table summarizing some of the most effective strategies you can use to start building your site's authority.
Effective Strategies to Boost Domain Authority
Strategy | Description | Timeframe for Impact |
|---|---|---|
Create 'Linkbait' Content | Produce original research, ultimate guides, or free tools that naturally attract links. | 6-12 months |
Improve Technical SEO | Fix crawl errors, boost site speed, and make your site mobile-friendly. | 1-3 months |
Strategic Guest Blogging | Write high-quality articles for reputable sites in your niche to earn a backlink. | 3-6 months |
Backlink Audit & Cleanup | Identify and remove or disavow toxic, low-quality links pointing to your site. | 1-3 months |
Internal Linking | Strengthen your site structure by linking between your own relevant pages. | 1-2 months |
Remember, these tactics work best when used together as part of a consistent, long-term plan. Patience and persistence are your greatest assets here.
Perform a Backlink Audit
Building good links is only half the battle; you also have to get rid of the bad ones. Low-quality or "toxic" backlinks from spammy websites can seriously damage your site's reputation and drag down your DA score.
Make it a regular habit to use an SEO tool to audit your backlink profile. Look for any links that seem unnatural or come from websites you wouldn't want to be associated with. If you spot any, your first step should be to contact the site owner and ask for removal. If that fails, your last resort is to use Google's Disavow Tool to tell the search engine to ignore them.
How to Check and Monitor Your Domain Authority
It’s one thing to understand the theory behind Domain Authority, but the real work starts when you check your score. Getting your hands on this number is the first practical step you can take towards improving it. Thankfully, finding your DA is simple, and a few brilliant tools can help you not just see your score but keep an eye on it over time.
Regularly checking your DA helps you see where you stand against your competitors and measure how well your SEO work is paying off. It gives you a clear, honest benchmark for your performance in your industry.
Using SEO Tools to Find Your Score
The most direct way to find your Domain Authority is by going straight to the source: [Moz's Link Explorer tool](https://moz.com/link-explorer). Since Moz invented the metric, their tool is the official home for it. All you need to do is pop in your website’s URL, and it will spit out your DA score, plus other handy information like linking domains and your top-performing pages.
Here’s a look at what the Moz Link Explorer dashboard shows you.
As you can see, the dashboard gives you a quick snapshot of your authority profile, clearly showing your Domain Authority score, the number of linking domains, and inbound links.
While Moz is the creator of DA, other big names in the SEO world have their own versions of an authority metric. Using them alongside DA can give you a more rounded picture of your website’s strength.
Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR): This score also runs on a 0-100 scale but focuses entirely on the quality and quantity of a site's backlink profile.
Semrush's Authority Score (AS): This is a compound metric that looks at a domain's overall quality and SEO performance, blending link power with organic traffic and other factors.
It's a good idea to use more than one tool to get a balanced view. Each platform has its own secret sauce, so your score will naturally be a bit different on each. The real secret is to pick a metric and stick with it, tracking its progress consistently.
Monitoring these scores is a fantastic way to gauge if your SEO strategy is working. For any business owner wanting to link these metrics to real-world results, learning how to track SEO performance offers a practical guide to measuring what truly matters. Checking in on your DA about once a month is a good rhythm—it's frequent enough to spot trends but not so often that you get bogged down by minor, everyday changes.
Common Misconceptions About Domain Authority
To get to grips with Domain Authority, you have to understand what it isn't. There are quite a few myths floating around this popular metric, and they can easily send you down the wrong track, chasing a number instead of focusing on what truly makes a website strong.
Let's clear up the biggest one right away: Domain Authority is a third-party metric created by Moz, not a ranking factor used by Google. That’s right, Google doesn't see or use your DA score. While a high DA often goes hand-in-hand with good rankings, it’s a correlation, not a cause.
DA Isn't the Only Metric on the Pitch
It's easy to fall into the trap of obsessing over your DA score, treating it as the ultimate measure of your site's health. But relying on DA alone is like a doctor checking only a patient's temperature – it's a useful signal, but it doesn't give you the full picture.
A smart strategy always looks at a blend of metrics from different tools. This gives you a much more rounded view of where you stand. You should be keeping an eye on things like:
Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR): This one hones in on the strength of your backlink profile.
Semrush's Authority Score (AS): This metric mixes link data with organic traffic estimates for a broader perspective.
Actual organic traffic and conversions: At the end of the day, these are the numbers that really matter for your business.
By combining these, you get a much more reliable and well-rounded assessment of your website's performance.
Key Insight: Think of DA as one instrument in your dashboard. A healthy SEO strategy is built on multiple data points, and DA should never be the only tool you use to diagnose your site's health or decide what to do next.
Why a Lower DA Site Can Outrank a Higher One
Ever Googled something and seen a site with a modest DA sitting proudly above a big-name competitor with a massive score? It happens all the time, and it’s the perfect example of why fixating on DA is a flawed approach.
How can a David beat a Goliath in the search results? A few key factors come into play.
Spot-On Content Relevance: Google's number one job is to give the searcher what they want. A page that perfectly and thoroughly answers a person's query will almost always beat a less relevant page, even if it's from a site with a huge DA.
Better On-Page SEO: A well-optimised page – we're talking a great title, fantastic user experience, and smart keyword use – can easily outperform a clunky page on a more "authoritative" domain.
Strong Page-Level Authority: Sometimes, a single page can accumulate powerful, relevant backlinks all on its own. This gives that specific page the clout to rank well, even if the rest of the website isn't as strong.
This just goes to show that while building your overall domain's reputation is a worthy goal, the quality of your content and your page-level optimisation can make all the difference. Understanding why SEO matters for business success ties all these ideas back to real-world growth. Don't chase a score; build a genuinely helpful and user-friendly website.
Got Questions About Domain Authority? Let's Clear Things Up.
To wrap things up, let's tackle some of the most common questions that come up when people first start digging into Domain Authority. Think of this as a quick-fire round to sort out any lingering confusion and solidify what you’ve learned.
How Long Does It Really Take to Increase Domain Authority?
This is the big one, isn't it? Everyone wants to know. The honest answer is: it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Improving your Domain Authority is a long-term game, so you need to have a bit of patience. You simply won’t see big leaps overnight.
Building genuine authority takes time. Search engines and tools like Moz need to see a steady, consistent pattern of high-quality backlinks being earned over months, and even years. For a brand-new website, it could easily take 6 to 12 months of focused, hard work just to climb from the starting blocks into the 20s or 30s.
Think of it like building a professional reputation in the real world. You don't become a trusted expert after one successful project. It's the result of delivering quality work, consistently, over a long period. The exact same principle applies to your website's authority.
Is Page Authority the Same as Domain Authority?
Nope, they're different, but they are closely related. Getting your head around the difference is key for developing a smarter, more targeted SEO strategy.
Domain Authority (DA): This predicts the ranking strength of your entire website. It's the big-picture score for your domain's overall reputation and backlink profile.
Page Authority (PA): This predicts the ranking strength of one single, individual page on your site.
A new page on a high-DA website gets a head start and will naturally have a higher initial PA. But that page can also build its own authority. For example, a really comprehensive guide on your blog might attract a lot of very specific, high-quality links, giving it a massive PA score, even while your site's overall DA is still growing.
Analogy: Think of a prestigious university (the domain) and one of its world-renowned professors (the page). The university has a powerful overall reputation (DA), but that professor has built their own specific renown (PA) through their unique research and publications.
So, What Is a Good Domain Authority Score?
There's no magic number here. A "good" Domain Authority score is completely relative. The only score that matters is one that makes you competitive in your specific industry.
If you’re a local bakery and your main competitors are sitting at a DA of 25-30, then getting your site to 35 would be fantastic. You’d have a real competitive edge in local search results.
But if you’re trying to go up against national brands with DA scores in the 70s and 80s, a score of 35 suddenly looks pretty low. It's all about context.
Your best move is to find your top 5-10 direct search competitors, check their DA scores, and set your sights on matching or, ideally, beating them. The goal isn't to chase an arbitrary number; it's to build enough authority to compete for the keywords that actually matter to your business.
Building a strong Domain Authority is a serious commitment, but it’s one of the most direct investments you can make in your website’s long-term ability to attract organic traffic and grow your business. If you need expert help creating a strategy that drives real growth, get in touch with Digital Sprout. Find out how our SEO services can help your business achieve its goals.