Has anybody ever seen (or written) a case study on increasing domain authority?
-
I am an in-house digital marketer for a small business in the UK. The majority of our business comes from people finding us on Google's organic SERPs for relevant search terms.
Our website has been around since 1999 and we have established a great base of keyword rankings in that time from key vanity keywords in our field that generate a tonne of long tail rankings for the product pages on our site.
Last year, I was given the target of increasing our websites DA from 40(something) to 60+ by the end of the year. I put a plan together at the start of the year which included things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', do 'proper' link building, do 'real' PR, make sure technical SEO is all up to scratch, increase CTR, reduce bounce rate etc etc
But... I wanted to find some examples of case studies where SEO's had taken a site with a starting DA of 'whatever' and increased it to 'a way higher whatever'.
I found a tonne of 'How to increase your domain authority' type blog posts which said things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', 'do proper link building' etc etc but no hard data case studies from people who had been successful in doing it!
I really just wanted to make sure that the plan I was putting together, was focused on the right things!
Does anybody know of any case studies? I'm still keen to check them out.
Being a small business, it's often the case that once we've put a plan together, we quickly realize that we don't have the resources, time, personnel or budget to follow it through but at lest having the plan confirmed by successful case studies doing the same thing or similar would really encouraging!
Thanks,
Rich -
Good luck with that!
And i will share one little secret. If you need to grow from 40 to 60 you need links from domains with DA above 70. Because that domains will be counted higher for growing. As i said before how you get them is another story.
PS: I may sound little bit rude but i'm faced similar problems and i working to get links, traffic grows. Meanwhile DA falling. Strange world.
-
Thanks Peter. I think you're right - We need better link building to be our focus and DA increase will follow.
The business is growing : ) and so will our DA.
In fact, maybe I'll do a case study on increasing DA at some point in the next 12 to 24 months ; )
-
Thanks Matt. You pretty much said what I was thinking! It was a frustrating target! Made all the more frustrating by the fact that the plan I put together, I believe would have moved the needle but very quickly, being a small business, we have to shift to work on whatever is the most important thing right now!
We're in a niche where our DA fluctuates between 40 - 50 and we are pretty much always above our competitors by a good way.
Our target was 60+ actually and I think we possibly could achieve it (or at least move towards it) if we had the time and skills to do better link building (as described by Peter below) and basically, as I've heard Rand say on numerous occasions, simply do better marketing ; )
-
Just to follow up—you've probably seen it, but our overview of Domain Authority might clarify things a bit. Also, though it's specifically meant to address unexplained fluctuations in DA/PA, this post by Rand will help explain the implications of the logarithmic scale.
-
TL;DR -your DA is small because your business is small. Period.
Domain authority is just a number. PR is also number.
You can rank very well also with little DA, same is with PR. Focusing with DA improvements is meaningless because DA can become higher with links/linkbuilding. And links can be earned with good content or forced with SEO linkbuilders. This definitely can improve little bit your DA. Even in SEO there is term "PR sculpting".
Playing with DA and site is same as "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". If your site grows with links then DA will be increased. But growing from 40 to 50 is same as growing from 0 to 40 as links. And from 50 -> 60 is same as 0 to 50. All happening due their logarithmic scale for parameters. And this require huge works.
So let's go back on "chicken/egg" problem - you can improve DA if you get links from trusted newspapers with sites as Guardian, Independent, Mirror, Daily Express, Telegraph, etc. Also can be trusted magazines with sites - Glamour, Elle, Wired, etc. You can get links from TVs - BBC, ITV, C4, C5, etc. You can get links sponsoring events - like BigBrother, X-Factor, etc. Then your DA will become higher. Now let's face question again - you're small and to make that media to talk about you need to grow to national wide and become giant in your niche.
And how you grow is different story that we can't answer without market research, financial analysis and some forecasts.
-
I'm not personally aware of any case studies that specifically cover raising Domain Authority, but that doesn't mean someone else here isn't.
I feel like I should caution you, though, that raising DA to a concrete goal that isn't benchmarked against your competitors is likely to be pretty frustrating. Because DA is scored on a logarithmic scale, what constitutes 100—the highest score—gets more and more difficult to achieve as we index the web, and as the sites at the top continue to build authority.
The best advice I can give you when setting your DA goals is to first determine the DAs of the sites you're directly competing with for SERP space, then focus on overtaking them. If you're in a field with sites at DA 45 doing very well, then it might not make sense to expend efforts hitting 60. Does that make sense?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?
We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
Migration to a new domain
Hi everyone, So i have one project where I'm planning to move current content on new domain, two reasons: 1. It seems current domain has some google penalty (backlink related, not manual) 2. Client wants rebranding and already has domain with new brand name. So as content is high quality and there is no content related penalty from google, what would be the best way to migrate existing content without passing any penalty AND without Google treating it as duplicate content. If i do 301 i suspect any penalty there is might follow, if i just copy existing content it won't be original content, what is the best solution here? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joelsemy0 -
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?
Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland1 -
6 months Later - 0 Domain Authority/Page Authority and losing Rankings
Hi Moz, Sorry if this comes across as a "Do My Job For Me" type of post but we are an E-Commerce store that have been live since January but have not seen any increase in performance on our site and over the past month, have even seen our rankings decrease. We have 1300 products on site and about 1500 pages in total. 1. As for on-site optimization, we have got 2 reviews and follow up reviews with a highly reputable reviewer from People Per Hour and solved any issues she has found. 2. Updated the Meta Data for products and Alt Descriptions for images focusing on the keywords we wish to rank for. We post weekly blogposts linking back to our products. 3. Social Media Campaigns with regular campaigns on FaceBook, Pinterest, Google+ and Twitter. 4. Attempted to build FOLLOW backlinks to articles relating to products on our site. We have also considered purchasing backlinks to improve our situation as we have yet to see any of these pages be crawled by Google over a month later. I have read a guides on Moz and other sites on how to improve our authority and improve rankings but none have offered much by way of practical solution. My question being, is this just a matter of patience or should I be worried/improving anything given we have 0 Domain Authority and Page Authority on all pages? Thanking you in advance, SEO Novice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csworkwear0 -
301 redirecting staff Domain to Company Domain
My colleague owns a domain (A) for about 10 years that he does not use. The domain's content is the same as my company's website (B) content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Question: Can I 301 redirect domain A to domain B's homepage or is it better he just closes down his website since this would not be SEO best practices? thank you0 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Domain migration strategy
Imagine you have a large site on an aged and authoritative domain. For commercial reasons the site has to be moved to a new domain, and in the process is going to be revamped significantly. Not an ideal starting scenario obviously to be biting off so much all at once, but unavoidable. The plan is to run the new site in beta for about 4 weeks, giving users the opportunity to play with it and provide feedback. After that there will be a hard cut over with all URLs permanently redirected to the new domain. The hard cut over is necessary due to business continuity reasons, and real complexity in trying to maintain complex UI and client reporting over multiple domains. Of course we'll endeavour to mitigate the impact of the change by telling G about the change in WMC and ensuring we monitor crawl errors etc etc. My question is whether we should allow the new site to be indexed during the beta period? My gut feeling is yes for the following reasons: It's only 4 weeks and until such time as we start redirecting the old site the new domain won't have much whuffie so there's next to no chance the site will ranking for anything much. Give Googlebot a headstart on indexing a lot of URLs so they won't all be new when we cut over the redirects Is that sound reasoning? Is the duplication during that 4 week beta period likely to have some negative impact that I am underestimating?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlie_Coxhead0