How Important Is Domain Authority?

“Domain Authority” (DA) is a term you might have seen crop up more than once as you seek to understand your SEO performance. DA is often promoted by SEOs and SEO tools as a meaningful evaluation of your success with organic search engines.

But that begs the question: does Domain Authority matter? It’s a complicated question, and the answer might surprise you. To put it simply, Domain Authority can be a useful tool for tracking the performance of your site, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of SEO like many people seem to believe. Rebecca Fairbanks, VP of Client Marketing at Coalition Technologies, sums it up pretty well:

“Domain Authority is not an official metric used by Google in determining rankings, and as a result, will always have some level of disconnect from the reality of your SEO performance. Using it to determine if your SEO is good or bad would be a mistake. However, DA can provide a helpful benchmarking when using 3rd party SEO tools to gauge their assessment of your SEO strategies. We recommend caution around relying on DA, simply because most 3rd party tools are not transparent in how they determine the score, which limits our ability to compare to real world strategies that have proven effective in ranking websites with Google.”

Sites that rank well often have a high DA, but because of opaque means of establishing DA by SEO tools, its never quite clear if they simply apply high Domain Authority scores to sites that rank well, or if they are really using a meaningful scoring system that tracks SEO efforts well.

What Is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is a ranking score created by the SEO software company Moz to help you determine how likely your page is to crop up on the first page of search results (also known as its page authority, in SEO lingo). Domain Authority scores have been widely replicated by other SEO tools-  Ahrefs uses Domain Rating, and SEMRush uses Authority Score. All essentially mean the same thing- an effort by a 3rd party, with no special relationship to Google, to measure the completeness of a site’s search optimization efforts.

If you’re wondering how much this matters, studies have shown that around three quarters of searchers never scroll past the first page, so the first few lines on a given Google page are prime real estate when it comes to your website’s visibility. The scoring system Moz uses ranges from 1 to 100, and it helps you to better understand how well your site is optimized for Google. Ahrefs’ Domain Rating also uses 0 to 100, while SEMRush uses 1 to 100.

For example, a site with a score of 100 is much more likely to appear on the first page of search engine results pages, and a site with a score of 1 probably won’t show up at all. It seems pretty open-and-shut: sites with higher Domain Authority do better than sites with none at all, at least if the numbers are to be believed. So, how important is DA scoring (or Domain Rating or Authority Score)? Actually… not as important as you might assume.

Relevant Sites Rank Higher

When it comes to hitting that elusive first page of Google, relevance matters more than your DA score. Your DA signifies that your site should rank high in Google, as Moz understands how to drive ranking. In practice, the relevance of your site tends to play a much larger role. What Domain Authority is good at has more to do with letting you know the potential of your page for clicks, not showing whether or not it’s thriving with tangible results.

Google’s job is to make sure that when someone searches for information, they’re happy with the results they find. One of the most important ways they accomplish this is through tools known as Spiders, which are like robotic scouts that a search engine sends out to research and compile pages that fit together under similar search umbrellas. So even if your page ranks high when it comes to page authority in SEO, that’s no guarantee that it actually fits in with those other pages…and, by extension, that it will matter to someone who’s searching for the term it shows up under.

Domain Authority only shows you where your page ends up on Google or Bing, not whether people are clicking on it and engaging with its content. If someone is searching for apple juice and they get Apple computers, it doesn’t matter how masterfully optimized the Apple computer site may be.

The Bottom Line

So, does DA matter? DA scores are great because they give you a tangible number that you can reference. And, SEO is extremely important, so naturally a high score is a highly desirable goal. But it’s important that you think of Domain Authority as being closer to a benchmark, not a destination in and of itself.

While you do want to keep an eye on what your Domain Authority score is doing when it comes to moving up and down the charts, it’s also crucial that you focus on the intangible aspect of your site — its relevant content, quality, and usability. That’s what makes organic traffic click on your site and stay there.

Google’s algorithms notice high turnover rates, so if your traffic is constantly bouncing to the next site, your Domain Authority score has very little worth. Your goal should be to deliver pertinent content populated with relevant links and keywords so that your site ranks high because it delivers legitimate value to its visitors. You need to leverage your page authority in SEO into something your potential customers will be happy to click on if they see it in their search results.

We Deliver Measurable Results

How important is DA? It can be a big help, but ultimately it’s just another tool in the box. Here at Coalition Technologies, we take a comprehensive, personalized approach to SEO that just works. We do more than just boost your Domain Authority. We help you create a relevant site that keeps visitors coming back while generating fresh traffic.

If your site isn’t performing as well as it could, our expert team can fix that. As a top-rated ecommerce agency, we work hard to keep our clients thrilled with our services, and that’s why we have a 99% client satisfaction rate. Connect with us online, and we’ll be glad to explain in full detail how we can help your business to thrive.