Fahim Ahmed
Domain authority is one of the most important metrics of SEO. It provides useful insight into your website and how likely it is to rank on SERP.
Knowing your domain authority can help you change your marketing strategy and improve overall SEO performances. Yet most bloggers seem to avoid increasing their website authority and just keep on publishing mediocre posts.
If you are really passionate about blogging and turn your blog into a business, make sure you focus on SEO alongside creating unique and insightful content.
It is very important to check your website’s performance. Auditing your website can help you improve your website performance by identifying problems within your website and content. It also keeps a track of your website’s progress over time.
There are a lot of SEO tools available to help you audit your website’s overall performance and check your domain authority. Most of those SEO tools are free to use and will help you rank in SERP faster.
Before you explore those SEO tools, you need to understand what is Domain Authority and why is it important.
What Is Domain Authority
Most of our partners often ask us ‘how to increase domain authority’ without understanding what these metrics actually mean.
If you have been blogging for a while you might have heard the term Domain Authority (DA) or Page Authority (PA). These fancy terms are often used by SEOs and digital marketers. Also, when you flip a domain or sell ad spaces to clients, these terms are frequently used.
In short, Domain Authority represents the reputation of your website and indicates how well your website is to perform on the search engine result page.
This is a metric developed by Moz to predict how likely your website is to rank on SERP compared to other websites. The DA is measured on a scale of 1 to 100. Websites with higher DA and PA are more likely to rank for a post.
One of the metrics Moz ad other DA checkers use is the number of backlinks a website has. Backlinks from other high authoritative websites increase domain authority.
Is It Important To Increase DA?
Yes, it is very important to increase your domain authority but the score shouldn’t be your only focus.
If you want to improve your SEO you should focus on what causes the DA score to rise.
Although Google never confirmed it, most SEOs and digital marketers believe that domain authority impacts ranking. There is no denying that you need high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites to rank on SERP. Because backlinks are seen as a trust factor by the Google search engine algorithm. Having quality backlinks pointed to your website means that people find your content to be useful and insightful.
Domain authority is a part of SEO among other things. When it comes to ranking on SERP there are a lot of factors involved which includes:
- Relevant keywords
- Unique contents
- High-quality backlinks
- On-page SEO
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
- Page authority
- Domain authority
There are over a billion websites indexed on Google. And probably hundreds of those websites are writing about the same topic as you. But only one website can show up at the top of the search result. This is when the effectiveness of SEO takes place.
How DA Affect Ranking
It is very difficult for a brand new website to rank for a competitive keyword as there are already many well-established websites with much better content. Older websites have more backlinks thus have high DA and PA. Because of that most well-established websites rank on top of SERP and get more organic traffic.
So if you want to sustain there is no alternative to increasing your domain authority.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t compete with those websites. Just like I’ve said before there are a lot of factors involved in SEO. Make sure you give importance to those other factors and meanwhile try to increase your DA by reaching out to people for backlinks. Make sure to use SEO tools to keep an eye on the metrics of your website and look for opportunities to grow.
Also, if you want to sell your website or sell ad spaces most advertisers and brands also look at those metrics and website analytics before they begin with any type of offering or deal. These metrics help clients understand the possibility of future growth.
Choosing the Right DA checker Tools
There are a lot of domain authority checker tools out there. But only a few of those show results that are more accurate. Also, some of the tools can be really helpful for SEO and auditing your site.
It is important you choose the correct tools for SEO because any wrong information about your website performance can change your overall SEO strategy.
We have experimented with most of these SEO tools and came up with the result. For the review, we have taken the core features of those SEO tools into consideration to rank them. The result below is based on overall performance but we will only focus on Domain Authority (DA) checker tool.
All the tools listed below can help you optimize your website for search engines.
Top 5 Domain Authority Checker Website
1. Ahrefs
Although Moz is the company that introduced ‘Domain Rating’ and ‘Page Rating’, it lacks a lot of features that Ahrefs is providing with its SEO tool. Ahrefs is undoubtedly the best tool for SEO and site audits.
While Ahrefs doesn’t use “Domain Authority” and “Page Authority,” it does measure “domain rating” and “URL rating.”
‘DR’ and ‘UR’ is the same concept as ‘DA’ and ‘PA’.
Ahrefs provide a much accurate rating of websites compared to other domain authority checker. The Ahrefs website authority checker shows important stats like the total number of linking websites and the total number of backlinks. It also shows the percentage of do-follow backlinks.
Ahrefs measures domain rating by taking a lot of important metrics into consideration. The Ahrefs webmaster tool also offers some awesome features to help you improve your SEO with crucial insights. You can troubleshoot issues that are hurting your site’s overall SEO and see ways to improve your SEO.
The best part about AWT is you won’t even have to drop a dime and get the best result.
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is another awesome SEO tool to check your domain authority. It also lets you check your organic search traffic alongside the number of keywords you are ranking for. Also, you can see the total number of backlinks and the number of referring domains.
There are also some more interesting additional features that give you an insight into your website’s overall performance on search engines. You can check SERP features, traffic trends, and keyword trends. Also, you can see the number of keywords you are ranking for by country.
You can see the top organic keywords you are ranking for and also check the organic position distribution. Furthermore, you can keep a track of your competitors. You can do a lot using their free SEO tools but if you want to explore further and dive deep, you can upgrade your plan and get access to more amazing features.
3. Moz Bar
Moz is the company that introduced the Domain Authority. As they are the pioneer of SEO tools, most people rely on Moz DA scores. Moz Bar is a free to use SEO tool that helps people find out their domain score. You can find the domain authority of any website using the Moz bar.
This simple chrome extension is an amazing SEO tool that highlights some important metrics such as DA and PA. It also shows the number of backlinks a webpage has. It can help you see how your page ranks compared to your competitor.
MozBar uses machine learning algorithms. These algorithms can adjust and re-calibrate your domain score based on recent link activity. It helps you get the most up-to-date information about your DA.
4. Majestic
Majestic is another SEO tool that helps people to check their backlinks easily. They have award-winning link intelligence data that helps websites to track backlinks. Some industry-leading SEOs believe that Majestic provides a much detailed and accurate backlink profile.
Their machine learning algorithms help the program to filter out the spammy backlinks and links from unwanted sources. Majestic mainly provides two metrics. One of them is trust flow which represents the quality of backlinks pointing to a domain. A website with a higher trust flow usually has good quality links. Majestic also provides citation flow that represents the number of backlinks pointed to a domain.
Both of these metrics are measured on a scale of 100.
Most high authoritative websites have higher trust flow and lower citation flow.
Majestic offers two index options for its premium users:
- Fresh: The fresh option provides you with data on backlinks multiple times a day. This metric is continuously refreshing to provide your company with the most updated domain score.
- Historic: The historic option allows you to look at older data. You can look at the URLs Majestic has crawled within the last five years.
These metrics are really useful when buying an older domain. It shows how a domain has been performing over the years. Also, it shows if a domain has been spammed with backlinks.
The historic data can help you analyze your SEO strategy as it helps you to see where you have lost backlinks. You can also check on your competitor and steal your competitor’s backlink.
5. Site Checker
SiteChecker is an SEO Suite that has a bundle of tools to improve your ranking and take your SEO game to a whole new level. It can analyze your site’s overall SEO and provide useful insight to improve overall performance.
Site checker offers tools like website health checker, SEO monitoring, On-Page SEO checker, free backlink checker, website rank tracker, and website backlink tracker.
Having a domain analysis tool like Site Checker can really help you improve your SEO drastically.
