Domain authority measures how likely your website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs.) It was developed by a company called Moz and has now basically become the barometer by which you can measure how much search engine street cred a site has. This translates into how valuable a backlink from a particular site will be. The higher your domain authority, the more valuable your backlinks are. However, there’s no direct correlation between domain authority and Google SERP ranking.

Let’s see

While there may not be a proportional link between domain authority and SERP ranking, you certainly want your site’s domain authority to be as high as possible (values range from 1-100). Check your website’s domain authority here.

Don’t be alarmed when you see that your site’s DA is not anywhere near the top. That’s pretty much reserved for sites with millions of high-quality backlinks like Wikipedia or Facebook or Google. If your site is brand new, it will have a DA score of 1, which will increase as you rack up more high-quality backlinks. If you want to find a target DA to reach, type your competitors’ domains into the tool linked above, then aim higher than whatever their DA scores happen to be.

To increase your domain authority, you need to increase the quantity and quality of backlinks to your site. As you might expect, this is not going to happen overnight. But with some strong link building campaigns, it can be done.

Using Blogger Outreach To Increase Your Domain Authority

One of the ways you can build quality backlinks to your site is by reaching out to bloggers or other publications with high domain authorities and enticing them to post about your products or services. As a natural part of this post, they would link either to your home page or, even better, directly to the page selling that product or service.

Here’s the outline of a blogger outreach campaign:

1. To get started, you’ll want to create a list of all the reputable bloggers or publishers who post articles in your particular niche. Remember to check their domain authority to be sure that getting a backlink from them will actually help your DA score.
2. Reach out to these bloggers, (usually by email, though sometimes Twitter works, too) and tell them why they really want to try your product or service. Try not to toot your own horn; you want to focus on how you can help them.
3. Offer them the opportunity to utilize your product for free in exchange for them posting a review of it on their blog. Bloggers with relatively lower DA scores who are just getting started will jump at this; bloggers with higher DA scores may also ask for monetary compensation.
4. Try to get a look at the post before it goes live. If you play it straight with these people, they’re not likely to post a negative review of your product. If it for whatever reason doesn’t work for them, they’ll simply post nothing at all. But if it’s as good as you claim, they’ll want to shout it from the rooftops.
5. Once they post their article, use all the social media power you have to promote it across the board. The more traffic you drive to it, the higher the article will rank organically and hence draw even more traffic. Simultaneously, you should ask the blogger to feature that article on their social media properties as well. Between the two of you, you can generate a substantial amount of interest in the post.
6. Rinse, repeat. The more you do this, the higher your domain authority will climb. Perhaps more importantly, you’ll be getting hot, enthusiastic visitors streaming to your site who are ready to buy your product or avail themselves of your service.

Using Native Content to Boost Your Domain Authority

Another way to raise your DA is to become an expert in your own right. Create content that anyone in your particular niche is going to find interesting, and then promote it accordingly. If you’ve got insightful analysis that people can’t get anywhere else, you’ll naturally start attracting backlinks from quality domains. Even if their DA is a bit lower than yours, that’s not going to hurt you.

Additionally, you can poke around amongst the sites in your niche to determine the quality of their content. If you feel like you’ve got some content that would be valuable to them, feel free to shoot them an email and tell them so. You can say something like: “I see that your content is a little light in x area. As it happens, I’m an expert at that sort of thing. Here are a few posts that could help you. Feel free to link to them from your site.”

Those are two solid means by which to increase your domain authority. Unfortunately, there are no worthwhile shortcuts to increase it overnight, but if you pursue these strategies, your DA will continue to grow over time until you’re a powerhouse in your niche.

If you don’t have time to conduct blogger outreach campaigns yourself, ArticleHub can help. That’s our jam, and we’ve been steering successful campaigns for going on ten years now. Learn more here.