Whether you built a website to start a business or simply to showcase your passion to a wide audience, creating and maintaining a space on the internet costs real money. Naturally, you would want to see some kind of return on investment from the efforts you give to your site. That’s where page authority comes in!
Why is Authority Important?
Aside from being a good metric in measuring a website’s success, a website’s authority also tells you how you can easily rank for your target keywords or, in other words, reach your target audience.
The competition for some keywords is quite stiff especially with the number of websites currently present on the internet fighting over the same keywords. Domain authority is great leverage when it comes to getting those keywords.
Basically, the higher your Domain authority is; the easier it would be for you to rank for keywords. Of course, there are other factors in ranking that are equally as important like content marketing and link building, but we’ll get into that in another article.
What does it have to do with my business? Domain authority is essential for search engine optimization (SEO) more visible presence on the internet. In essence, your website will do its own marketing for you if it has good authority with great SEO.
Google’s E-A-T Algorithm – Authoritativeness
In August 2018, Google rolled out its major update, E-A-T which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Its purpose is to help the readers quickly find the relevant information they are looking for. In this article, we’ll focus more on Authoritativeness.
Becoming an expert in a certain field is one thing, being an authority is another. A good and measurable sign of authority is the number and quality of websites linking to your content. Of course, there are a lot of ways to build authority for your website more on that below.
Page Authority V.S Domain Authority
As mentioned above, Page authority shows you how a single page from a website is performing compared to other pages in answering a query. Domain authority, on the other hand, is a measurement of how a website performs for queries under a certain niche.
A page can compete for authority with other pages on the same website while a domain competes for authority with other websites in a given niche.
It’s best to think about it as levels. Page-level authority and domain-level authority. Both are equally important for ranking
Let’s go back to the handbag company. Two pages on their website can compete for the same query “how to make handbags from scratch.” One can rank higher than the other depending on the content quality.
On a domain-level competition, the company’s website competes with other handbag websites.
Frequently Asked Questions
Page Authority tells you how good that page is performing in comparison to other pages for a specific query. Page Rank is the position where your page shows.
For a query about handbags, your business could have a low page authority but appear higher in page ranking (the first page in search results) if you answer a query effectively.
A good domain authority score is always relative to your competitor’s score. List down your direct and indirect competitors with their domain scores. You would always want to be higher than your competition. So if your competitors score at 30 – 45, a strategically good domain authority would be 50 – 60.
There are a lot of factors why your authority drops. The most common causes of an authority score dropping are:
– You haven’t produced new content for a while.
– You have a new competition that is doing better in terms of answering queries informatively and clearly.
– You might have used some sketchy SEO techniques. Google can catch that and give you a lower authority score.
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