How To Improve Your Website’s Domain Authority

Domain

“How can I rank higher on Google?” This is the $64 million question asked by every business attempting to generate new business – and law firms are no exception. Ranking highly in Google and Bing search results can lead to more conversions, and thus more business for your law firm. Reports indicate websites ranking as the very first organic search result receive 42% of traffic, while the second result gets only 11%, and the third 8%. So how can your law firm’s website jumpstart its race to the top? By focusing on domain authority.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a score developed to analyze how likely your website is to rank on SERPs – or search engine result pages. While a website’s domain authority analysis includes a variety of metrics and variables just like Google’s algorithm does, it focuses heavily on the number of referring domains (also commonly called backlinks) for a given website.

Backlinks are links to your website from other websites – good backlinks are from sites that already have strong credibility with Google. By linking from the external site to your website, the external site shares some of its SEO value with your site. A backlink indicates to Google your website is so authoritative on a topic that other quality websites are linking to its content as a reference. In other words, it’s the equivalent of a digital footnote or citation.

How Can I Find Out My Website’s Domain Authority?

Many free tools exist, but the best one for analyzing domain authority is Moz. Simply enter your website here: https://moz.com/domain-analysis. Within seconds, the tool tells you the website’s domain authority (on a scale of 0 to 100), the number of linking root domains, and the number of ranking keywords.

Keep in mind that most law firm websites exist in the 0 to 60 range for domain authority, so don’t panic if your score isn’t very high. Even some of the largest, oldest, and most established law firms in the country only have domain authority scores in the low to mid-50s. And keep in mind: because domain authority is scored using a logarithmic scale instead of a linear scale, it is significantly easier to increase your score from 15 to 25 than from 75 to 85.

How Do I Increase My Score?

In order to increase domain authority, one of the most crucial considerations is increasing the number of backlinks to your website. This practice is referred to as “link building,” and it’s an ongoing process that should be part of a long-term digital marketing strategy.

Primarily focus on building quality links over quantity. A backlink from one or two high domain authority websites will carry a lot more weight than a bunch of backlinks from low authority websites. National news organizations, leading industry publications, and websites with .edu or .org top level domains generally have strong domain authority. You can also use the same Moz tool mentioned above to:

  • Analyze your strongest competitors and see the Top Linking Domains for their websites.
  • Engage in strategic outreach to some of these domains for backlinks.
  • Determine what high value domains are missing from competitors’ link profiles and request backlinks from some of these domains.

Building backlinks takes time, and often requires reaching out to a lot of websites in order to obtain just one or two backlinks. Stay focused on the long game over time, and work on making small steps towards building your SEO value by increasing domain authority.

Law Firm Digital Marketing

If your law firm needs help evaluating its website and determining the best strategy for improving its digital presence, the legal marketing experts at Stacey E. Burke, P.C. can help. Contact us today for more information.

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