What Is Domain Authority And Why Is It Important?
Updated: Sep 15, 2022
Learn the relevance of Domain Authority to Law Firm SEO Ranking
Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking score that measures your website's approximate relevance in a certain industry. Developed by Moz, the higher your DA score, the more likely your pages will rank higher than those that scored less. Increasing your domain authority can boost your overall rankings.
Does Domain Authority Matter?
Admittedly, it's not a definitive measure. How pages perform on the search engines can still be influenced by a slew of other SEO factors, after all. However, it's also true that high authority domains tend to do better in the rankings, even when faced with other pages of the same quality.
For Example:
Say you're competing with two other blogs posting similar content or topics, all three of which are well-optimized and high-quality. Even so, if you have higher Domain Authority, search engines will sometimes consider your content to be better or more relevant.
If you try looking doing a quick search on Google right now, you'll notice that the pages taking the top spot are well-established and reputable domains.
Thus, high domain authority can sometimes give you an edge over other similarly-performing websites. It can sometimes imply industry authority, so your word is taken with more weight than your competitors.
3 Ways To Boost Your Law Firm's Domain Authority
Boosting your domain authority can boost your entire website—along with all the pages and blog posts you publish. Below are a few domain authority boosts you can immediately implement on your site.
1. Complete Your On-Page SEO
As mentioned, DA isn't a definitive measure. Your rankings can still be influenced by a few other Lawyer SEO factors, including content and page quality, user experience, site traffic, keywords, and page optimization.
If you fail to optimize your page, other domains with well-structured pages will start overtaking you.
Here are a few tips to improve your on-page SEO:
Build and optimize essential site pages. Make sure all your site pages are complete and optimized. For example, your homepage, about page, contact information, offered services (areas of law), and blog pages should be in place. A poorly built website can sometimes turn off a few site visitors.
Optimize your internal links. Your internal links tell search engines and users where everything is. In addition, you can use it to organize and establish page hierarchy—showing which pages on your site take high priority over others.
Optimize images. Your images are so much more than aesthetic page elements that can attract and hold the attention of users. Images have titles, alt text, and captions. Texts that can't be seen by a user on the live version of the site can absolutely be read by search engine bots sent to crawl your pages.
Monitor and improve user experience. If your site is hard to read, buggy or slow, site visitors might get turned off. Remember, there are thousands (if not millions) of other pages that compete with you. If you make it difficult for users to stick around in any way, they will leave and find what they need elsewhere.
(Previous blog posts discussing each of these on-page SEO tips are also linked for your easy access.)
2. Get Backlinks From High Domain Authority Websites
In a previous post about backlinks, we explained how backlinks from good domains could boost your rankings. If a high-authority domain links to your pages—either as citations or endorsements—search engines will recognize them as votes of confidence to your domain.
When a high-authority website links to your domain, it means that your pages must be relevant, high-quality, and worth showing to users on the search results.
Remember: High authority sites don't just willingly link to any domain. They have to be earned. You can find backlinks by getting your content cited, your domain mentioned, or your content getting featured on other domains.
3. Get Rid Of Bad Backlinks
So, you now know that you can boost your DA by getting backlinks from high-authority domains. All links are meant to tell search where and what everything is, and that's why they're so important in Lawyer SEO.
However, the same is true for toxic backlinks. If you have far too many spammy and suspicious sites linking to you, search engines also associate you with low-quality domains and content. Additionally, when backlinks pointing back to you are completely irrelevant to your site or blog, search engines can also read that as spam.
Remember: Even if you weren't the one responsible for the spammy links, it still counts as Negative SEO on your site.
So make sure to have them removed; if you can't do so by asking, you can disavow those links by using Google's disavowing tool.
What Can LawyerLeadMachine Do For You?
Lawyer SEO requires multiple steps of optimization that eventually boost traffic and conversions. Working on your on-page and off-page SEO can bring cumulative benefits to your law firm's marketing efforts, as well as boost domain authority in the long run.
To get started on your SEO strategy, you can review your options here.
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