There is a wealth of information about Domain Authority (DA) and I don’t intend to repeat it here. Instead, you can perform a Google Search and find articles like this one.
Use this link to check your or your competitors’ DA.
In a nutshell, Domain Authority is a popular proprietary measure of the authority of a website, in other words, how well it is likely to rank organically in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
What is considered to be a Good Domain Authority?
- Scores between 40 and 50 are considered average.
- DA between 50 and 60 must be rated as good.
- Scores above 60 rate the DA as excellent.
Domain Authority - We just want our website to rank
Most businesses want their websites to rank well in the SERPS when prospective clients are looking for any products or services that they supply. This is plain common sense.
The sad truth is that there are many unscrupulous suppliers out there promising solutions to this problem under the heading of SEO. The school of hard knocks has taught me that even scrupulous SEO suppliers can be more interested in their own business than their clients’.
My speciality is “local businesses” which doesn’t mean businesses close to me. It means customers come to them wherever they may be located. Or it could mean they serve a local area by visiting their customers.
I deal a lot with Financial Services such as IFAsand the like and I have an interesting story about Domain Authority in that sector. For the uninitiated, an IFA is an Independent Financial Adviser.
St James Place (SJP) is a very well-known brand with thousands of IFA “Partners”. The DA of SJP was 56 when I last checked. However, the DA of many of its partners is less than 10. This is somewhat puzzling. You would have thought that partners would benefit from the association with a big brand website like SJP’s.
Ranking locally does not require a website
My practical advice to any local business with a low Domain Authority is to focus on ranking in Google’s local search algorithms. This is easier to dominate than an organic search where Domain Authority is a major factor. In fact, it is quite possible to rank in position #1 in local search and not even have a website at all.
Franchises like SJP would do much better for their franchisees (partners) if they put just a little effort into local search optimisation which they usually ignore completely.
In the case of SJP, encouraging or compelling their partners to use or link to the SJP main website is clearly not serving them well from a client acquisition perspective. I see the same issue with other national franchises. I believe that it stems from a lack of knowledge within those organisations about the difference between local and organic SEO.
Luckily there is no shortage of information about local search with several global businesses focusing on just that. They include BrightLocal, Whitespark, Local Falcon and Locafy amongst others.