“I need an SEO expert to increase my website's domain authority from 20 to 45 in a week.”
This job title came across my timeline on a popular freelance platform a while back.
My response?
“I would also love to complete a full marathon in an hour.”
That’s about as realistic as increasing a website’s domain authority from 20 to 45 in a week.
Want to know why?
Domain authority (DA) takes time. This metric helps shine light on how high a website will rank, and it relies on multiple factors. From acquiring a strong portfolio of high-quality backlinks to creating mind-blowingly good content, it isn’t something you can do on the fly.
Shortcuts may seem tempting in the race to lead on search rankings. However, much like a marathon, steady, persistent efforts are what eventually lead to success.
What type of effort, you ask?
That’s what this article is all about: Practical and effective tips and techniques you can regularly use to increase your website’s domain authority score.
TL:DR:
- Domain authority is a metric developed by Moz to help predict how high a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Domain authority is NOT an official search engine ranking factor. Nonetheless, studies have shown that websites with higher rankings often tend to have a good domain authority score, as well.
- Increasing your domain authority score comes by improving your website’s quality all-round.
- The techniques that help to increase your domain authority score are focused on either improving organic traffic or your backlink profile.
- These techniques include identifying and eliminating low-quality backlinks, creating awesome content, and improving on-page, off-page, and technical SEO factors.
The marathon mindset: Why domain authority matters
Domain authority (DA) is Moz’s proprietary metric for predicting a website’s likelihood of ranking in SERPs. This search engine ranking score ranges from 1 - 100, with higher scores indicating a higher ranking probability and vice versa.
Many website owners endlessly search for new ways to increase their website’s domain authority. Funnily enough, webmaster trends analyst at Google, Jon Mueller, states that major search engines like Google don’t use domain authority for search at all.
In fact, there’s no mention of the word in the explanation of how Google Search works.
Instead, Google’s search algorithms focus on the following signals:
- Source expertise
- The words in a query
- Location and settings
- Page relevance and usability
- EEAT principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
So, what’s the frenzy about?
How domain authority helps build online credibility
For starters, studies conducted by Moz show that websites with high search rankings tend to have high domain authority scores. Further studies by Ahrefs also reveal that domain authority is a useful metric to gauge a website’s ability to attract organic traffic.
An academic study by Danilo Reyes-Lilo et al. also concludes that DA scores effectively estimate the website-level metrics Google uses in its algorithm.
These, and many other studies, have shown that domain authority is a reliable metric for measuring a website’s expertise, trustworthiness, and authority.
Another reason why domain authority has gained credibility is that it incorporates backlinks into its scoring.
Backlinks are links created when one website links to another. They are one of the multiple signals used for calculating domain authority scores. Interestingly, Google also takes backlinks into account when determining a website’s level of authority, expertise, and trustworthiness.
While Google may not endorse DA directly, the fact that domain authority scores depend on a ranking factor that Google uses (i.e., high-quality backlinks) lends support to its credibility.
Finally, tracking your domain authority score can help you evaluate your competition and the progress of your SEO efforts over time.
That’s what the frenzy is all about.
A high domain authority score indicates a high level of trustworthiness, credibility, and authoritativeness to both searchers and search engines.
However, your website can’t cut through the crowd like Usain Bolt in this marathon of credibility. Instead, you need to embrace the long and winding journey of SEO, maintaining a steady pace of quality content and backlinks to build trust and authority step by step.
“But why?”
As Warren Buffet said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation.”
Think of DA as your online reputation.
You’re likely thinking you don’t have 20 years. So, exactly how long does it take to increase domain authority?
How long does it take to increase domain authority?
Your domain authority score is a work in progress; It’s not like there’s a clock on it. However, studies have revealed that websites begin to experience significant changes between three and six months of consistent, effective action. Scores from 60 and above are generally considered to be high. However, you shouldn’t be entirely focused on playing the numbers game. Rather, your goal should be to outrank your competitors.
Any score higher than your competitors’ is a good domain authority score. For instance, if the highest-ranking website in your niche has a domain authority score of 35, then 40 is a solid goal to shoot for.
This marathon begins with the steps we’re discussing in the next section. Ready? Get set. Race! 👟
5 Tried-and-true techniques to boost your website authority and outrank competitors
The techniques we’re about to discuss will focus on making your web pages the most relevant and useful ones to searchers. Organic traffic and website backlink profiles are two major signals search engines use to gauge the relevance of a web page.
The tips in this section aim to improve the quantity of your website’s high-quality backlinks and your organic traffic—both of which are major catalysts for an increased domain authority score.
Without further ado, here are five practical methods to increase your website’s domain authority.
1. Identify and remove low-quality domains linking to your website
Earlier, we mentioned that increasing your domain authority score is all about enhancing your website’s overall quality. Think of it like maintaining a garden.
You need to remove the weeds from your garden to prevent them from stifling your plants' growth. Low-quality domains linking to your site are those pesky weeds, and removing them is crucial to boosting your domain authority.
Your focus here should be on ensuring that only high-quality backlinks link to your website.
The first step towards achieving this is conducting a site-wide backlink audit to assess the quality and quantity of domains linked to your website. For this, you can use tools like Moz’s Link Research tool, Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool, or Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Moz’s Link Explorer tool
The Moz Domain Authority tool and Link Explorer tool show you vital backlink success metrics like page authority, spam score, and complete link counts to your site. You can easily track these metrics over time with user-friendly graphs.
Additionally, the tool allows you to benchmark these metrics against up to five competitors.
Source: Moz Free Backlink Checker
Semrush’s Backlink Audit Tool
Likewise, Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool helps you identify and remove low-quality domains using a toxicity score. This score is based on the number of suspicious domains linking to your website.
Ahref’s Site Explorer
Site Explorer by Ahrefs also offers similar metrics to gauge the quality of backlinks. The tool has access to an index of over 14 trillion live backlinks, which helps you determine the quality of the websites linking to your site.
Lose those low-quality links with Moz’s spam score
One common metric for identifying a low-quality domain is the spam score. This is Moz’s proprietary metric for indicating a site’s likelihood of being penalized by Google for spammy practices.
Put simply, it reflects a website’s odds of being spammy and is a reliable metric for identifying low-quality links that you should eliminate. As a best practice, get rid of links from domains with spam scores higher than 30%. You can do this by either using the tools mentioned above or personally contacting the site owners and asking them to remove the links.
A typical process of identifying and eliminating low-quality backlinks would entail the following steps when using Semrush’s backlink audit tool:
- Enter your website URL: This will give you an overview of your backlink profile. Navigate to the ‘Audit’ tab marked out in the image below. This shows you all your site’s backlinks.
- Check for spammy links: Identify the spammy ones by analyzing the scores of each site.
- Disavow spammy links: Once you’re sure of the spammy links, you can click on them and disavow them, as shown below.
- Create a disavow list: Clicking on disavow moves all the spammy websites you’ve identified to a ‘disavow list.’ This list can be exported to a well-formatted .txt file, as shown below.
- Use the Google disavow tool: Finally, import the.txt file containing the list of websites to be disavowed using the Google disavow tool shown below.
Keep in mind: Google considers the act of disavowing links to your site as an advanced action. You should only do it when you’re absolutely sure that there is, or about to be manual action against your site due to those links. Even then, the measure should be a last-resort action after you’ve tried to remove those links manually by reaching out to the site owners.
2. Create EEAT content
You need to consistently publish relevant content on your website to reach the ‘finish line’ of domain authority.
Many website owners try to trick search engine algorithms using deceptive tactics like keyword stuffing, link farming, and backlink purchases. Although these practices may lead to temporary improvements, they are unsustainable and may even warrant severe penalties from search engines.
Instead, focus on helping your readers.
The ranking systems of major search engines like Google are designed to present “helpful, reliable, information that’s primarily created to benefit people, NOT to help gain search engine rankings.” These algorithms simply try to optimize their processes to serve up the most relevant result to a search query in record time.
Your job is to ensure that the search engine considers the content on your website as the most relevant result.
Ensure every piece of content demonstrates Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Start by asking these questions:
- What’s the searcher’s intent?: Figure this out through comprehensive keyword research. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs, and Semrush.
- Which existing resources cater to this intent?: Figure this out through comprehensive competitor analysis and a content gap analysis.
- How can the existing resources better cater to this search intent?: Introduce additional value to the reader with your content.
Content formats like infographics, guides, case studies, videos, interviews with SMEs, reports, and graphs have been proven to offer additional value to readers. Searchers tend to trust them more for this reason. Make sure to conduct original research, write proprietary data analysis reports, and even independent studies if you have the bandwidth.
All of the above will help position you as a trustworthy source of information.
It’s all about offering value.
Create content that goes the extra mile in solving the searcher’s problem. These 10 SEO content writing tips can also guide your content creation efforts in the right direction.
If you do this consistently enough, other websites will start linking to your web pages as an authoritative source, thus increasing your high-quality backlink profiles. A healthy combination of these factors will build up your domain authority score in the long run.
3. Implement link-building strategies
Once you’ve got a library of awesome link-worthy content, you’ve got to tell every relevant entity in your niche that it would be beneficial for them to link to it.
Hoping that other websites will find and link to your high-quality content and resources is like hoping to find love without ever leaving your house—possible, but very unlikely. It’s better to be more proactive in your approach.
Start by curating a list of relevant high-domain authority websites in your niche.
You can also conduct a broken link audit of these sites to identify opportunities. A broken link audit helps you identify disconnected links on a website. When you identify those, you can offer your link-worthy content as an alternative.
Responding to journalist requests is also an effective link-building strategy. Journalists often request valuable information from experts in various niches. You can find these opportunities on platforms like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), ResponseSource, and Gorkana.
Additionally, following the hashtag #journorequest on X will help you discover more leads. Many journalists use it to search for expert quotes.
4. Identify and fix on-page SEO issues
It’s crucial to ensure that search engines and users can access and experience your content easily. That’s where identifying and fixing on-page SEO issues comes into the picture. On-page SEO is a very broad aspect of SEO that involves improving a webpage and its content in order to boost search engine rankings. It encompasses, but is not limited to, the following components:
- Technical SEO: The segment of SEO that focuses on optimizing a website’s infrastructure to facilitate better crawling, indexing, and ranking by search engines.
- Content optimization: Enhancing your site’s content using relevant keywords, formatting, and information to improve its visibility in SERPs.
- Internal linking structure: How the hyperlinks connecting different pages on your website are organized.
- Meta titles and descriptions: Meta titles are the clickable text that appears on SERPs and browser tabs summarizing a page’s content. On the other hand, meta descriptions refer to short, relevant content summaries that appear below meta titles in SERPs.
- URL structure: The format and organization of your website’s URL. Keeping it clean, descriptive, and easy to read improves both search engine visibility and user experience.
- Image optimization: The process of enhancing your website’s images so that search engines and users understand and experience them better.
- Canonical tags: HTML elements that indicate the preferred or “canonical” version of a piece of content to search engines.
- Alt text: Short for “alternative” text, an alt text is a text snippet describing an image’s content. It is displayed instead of the image whenever the image doesn’t load.
- Permalinks: As the name implies, this refers to the permanent URL structure of a post, page, or other piece of content on your website.
- Heading tags: HTML elements that help both readers and search engines understand the hierarchical organization of your content. They range from H1 (main title) to H6 (subheadings). It’s best practice not to worry about headings below a H4 tag.
How to start an on-page SEO strategy
Start your on-page SEO efforts with a site-wide audit. Tools like the Moz On-Page Grader, Moz Site Crawler, and Screaming Frog can help you identify major on-page SEO issues. Common examples include broken images, missing alt tags, duplicate meta descriptions, H1 tag issues, and more.
You can fix some of these issues by ensuring your web pages are optimized for relevant target keywords. This can be done by naturally placing main keywords in the title tags, meta descriptions, URL slugs, and headings. You should also ensure that the image alt texts give a succinct description of the image.
To improve your website’s internal linking structure, organize your content using the topic cluster model. You can use this model by grouping a series of thematically related content pages into clusters and dicing them into pillar pages. This structure makes it easier for both searchers and search engines to navigate your website.
5. Identify and fix technical SEO issues
Technical SEO is a subsection of on-page SEO that focuses on optimizing your website's technical elements. These optimizations help search engines crawl, index, and rank your web pages effectively.
Some key aspects of technical SEO are:
- Website structure: how your site is organized and its overall architecture.
- Website speed: ensuring your website loads faster.
- Website security: Keeping visitors safe while they browse your website
- Mobile-friendliness: Your site works well on mobile devices so users can easily access it on the go
All these factors combine to determine your website’s overall user experience (UX). They all affect your domain authority (DA) score.
The idea is that a website with a fast loading time, adequate security, easily navigable structure, and mobile responsiveness is more useful to a searcher because it delivers a better overall experience.
So, let’s discuss some best practices to ensure visitors have a smooth experience on your website.
You need to:
Help search engines crawl and index your website effectively.
This means making your website’s most important pages accessible and easy to navigate. Here are some best practices to ensure that:
- Create, submit, and regularly update a XML sitemap: This file contains a structural map of your website, showing how your web pages are connected. Submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and update it regularly as you add new pages.
- Optimize website architecture: Group related pages together and maintain a clear hierarchical structure to facilitate crawling.
- Utilize a robots.txt file: This file controls which parts of your site search engines can access. It helps to protect your site from malicious bots and prevents crawlers from indexing unimportant pages, thus improving your site’s overall speed.
Speaking of speed, Google considers page speed a direct ranking factor for search results…
Increase your page speed
Try measuring the current speed of your web pages using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Google’s Core Web Vitals Reports will also help you measure the entire website’s performance.
Next, increase that speed by:
- Compressing files: Large files take up more space and more time to load. Optimize images, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files to reduce load times.
- Minifying code: Remove unnecessary elements like code comments and whitespace to decrease file size.
Keep visitors safe
Use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS security rather than HTTP. It’s a lightweight ranking signal, and your site will be marked “not secure” in the Chrome browser without it.
Ensure mobile friendliness
Google has been using mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor since 2016. So, having a mobile-responsive website is non-negotiable if you’re serious about boosting your DA score.
These are just the basics. There are more technical details you need to examine to fix your site’s technical SEO issues.
You can cover it all together, starting with a site-wide technical SEO audit. To do this comprehensively, you might need to employ the services of a developer or a crawl-based tool like the Moz Site Crawl tool.
Focus the entire process on identifying issues such as canonical errors, duplicate pages, messy URLs, page speed issues, broken links, issues with Robots.txt, and more.
After identifying these issues, taking the active steps highlighted above will help ensure your site is mobile-friendly, more secure, easily navigable, and loads faster.
How to increase domain authority over time: a checklist
Boosting your domain authority isn’t a one-time task—it’s a long-term strategy that requires continuous effort. Use this checklist to improve your website’s credibility, trustworthiness, and authority over time.
✅ Continuously audit and improve your backlink profile
A strong, high-quality backlink profile is one of the most important factors for increasing domain authority. Regularly monitor your backlinks and take proactive steps to improve their quality.
☐ Conduct regular backlink audits using tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush to analyze the quality of your inbound links.
☐ Identify and remove toxic backlinks by disavowing spammy, irrelevant, or low-quality links that could harm your domain authority.
☐ Develop a proactive link-building strategy focused on acquiring links from high-authority, niche-relevant websites.
☐ Reach out to industry blogs, news outlets, and authoritative websites for guest posting opportunities or collaboration.
☐ Monitor competitors' backlinks to find new linking opportunities and replicate their most successful strategies.
☐ Leverage broken link building by identifying broken links on authoritative sites and offering your content as a replacement.
✅ Optimize content to keep it relevant (or make it evergreen)
Search engines prioritize fresh, high-quality, relevant content. Optimizing and updating your existing content ensures it remains useful and competitive in search rankings.
☐ Regularly update outdated content with new statistics, case studies, and current trends to keep it relevant.
☐ Identify and refresh underperforming pages that used to rank well but have lost visibility.
☐ Create evergreen content that remains useful over time (e.g., ultimate guides, industry FAQs, how-to articles).
☐ Use internal linking to connect new and old content, helping search engines understand the relationship between pages.
☐ Repurpose high-performing content into multiple formats (e.g., turning blog posts into videos, infographics, or downloadable PDFs).
☐ Improve on-page SEO by optimizing meta descriptions, headings, and keyword placements to align with search intent.
✅ Strengthen your technical SEO for long-term growth
Technical SEO ensures that search engines can easily crawl, index, and rank your website. Ignoring these elements can hold back your domain authority growth.
☐ Perform regular technical SEO audits to detect and fix site issues (e.g., crawl errors, broken links, duplicate content).
☐ Optimize site speed and Core Web Vitals to improve load times and user experience.
☐ Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and responsive to accommodate all devices.
☐ Implement structured data (schema markup) to help search engines better understand your content.
☐ Secure your site with HTTPS encryption to protect user data and improve trust signals.
☐ Optimize your XML sitemap and robots.txt file to guide search engines in properly indexing your pages.
✅ Expand your digital footprint with multi-channel SEO
A broader digital presence increases your chances of earning high-quality backlinks, attracting new audiences, and building brand authority.
☐ Optimize for Google Discover and featured snippets by structuring content to answer common industry questions.
☐ Distribute content on multiple platforms (like LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, and Quora) to gain referral traffic and backlinks.
☐ Optimize for local SEO by creating and maintaining a Google Business Profile if you target location-based audiences.
☐ Publish guest blog posts and contribute to industry forums to establish expertise and credibility.
☐ Use social media and content marketing to generate engagement and potential backlinks.
☐ Engage in digital PR efforts by pitching thought leadership pieces to high-authority publications.
✅ Monitor competitors and adjust your SEO strategy
Keeping an eye on your competitors ensures that you stay ahead of industry trends and capitalize on new ranking opportunities.
☐ Analyze competitors' backlink profiles to find linking opportunities and high-authority domains to target.
☐ Monitor their top-performing content to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in your own content.
☐ Track changes in competitor keyword rankings to adjust your SEO and content strategy accordingly.
☐ Observe competitors' on-page optimizations, site structure, and internal linking strategies to learn what’s working.
☐ Use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to track competitor domain authority and traffic trends.
☐ Stay up to date on Google algorithm updates and adjust your SEO efforts to align with evolving ranking factors.
Increasing domain authority isn’t about shortcuts—it’s about consistent, high-quality SEO efforts over time. By following this checklist, you’ll build a stronger, more authoritative website that ranks higher, earns trust, and attracts organic traffic that converts.
Leave your domain authority woes to dslx
Pulling ahead of your competitors in the race for the top spot on SERPs requires more than a few good blog posts and high-quality backlinks. You have to take a comprehensive look at your entire website and content library. In addition, continuous checks and updates are essential because there’s always competition trying to beat you to the top.
But, here’s the good news: You don’t have to run this marathon alone.
Here at dslx, we prioritize long-term results over sneaky quick wins.
We’re focused on proving that quality always wins, and we’re in it for the long haul. We can hold your hand throughout the race via our content and SEO services.
We’re talking behind-the-scenes technical SEO audit, comprehensive keyword and competitor research, on-page optimization, and content strategy—the exact techniques that improve your DA score.
Still trying to figure out where to start?
Right here is just great! 📍
