Enhancing Domain Authority of Your Webflow Website

Google considers multiple ranking factors when ranking each page in the search engine results. While improving your website from a technical standpoint and optimizing it for the right keywords is important, it may not work as well if your site lacks authority. Websites that rank high in the SERP typically have a higher domain authority score. 

So how does Google define the authority of a website? What is domain authority score? How to improve it? You’ll find the answers to those questions below.

What is Domain Authority?

To understand domain authority, let’s start with what it isn’t – a ranking factor. Google doesn’t use it in its ranking systems, and the company doesn't use the term itself.

This metric is determined by SEO tools — domain authority checkers. Domain authority is just the commonplace name for it, although most tools use different terms like site authority, website trust, domain rating, or, in the case of SE Ranking, domain trust.

Domain authority checkers calculate it based on a website's number of backlinks and the quality of those backlinks. If many websites with high domain authority link to your site and very few spammy websites do, your site will have a good score.

So, this metric developed by SEO professionals allows you to quickly gauge how good your backlink profile is and compare it to your competitors.

Why is Domain Authority Important?

Why does domain authority matter if it’s not a ranking factor but a measure of link-building efforts? The reason is that Google has a similar system that evaluates website authority based on the backlinks pointing to it called PageRank. The patent for this system is publicly available, but Google will never tell exactly how the system determines website authority.

Domain authority metrics are SEOs’ best guess on how this Google ranking system works. The exact formula differs from one SEO tool to another, but in the end, most tools show a pretty decent approximation of how good your backlink profile is.

While domain authority metrics don’t have an influence on your rankings, your backlink profile does. It’s not the only thing that influences ranking, but on average, the higher domain rating a website has, the more links point to it, the higher it will rank. This ultimately leads to more organic traffic and reduced average cost per lead from inbound marketing.

Your goal in search engine optimization is to build more quality links and get a higher ranking. Domain authority is a metric that measures exactly that. Increasing it would be a good indicator of off-page SEO and can serve as a measurable KPI for your SEO efforts.

Tips for Improving Domain Authority of the Webflow Website

When it comes to doing SEO for Webflow websites, you already have a lot of things going in your favor. The technical aspect of SEO is just as important as off-page, and Webflow pretty much covers that by default.

Webflow templates are optimized to perform well on all platforms. Webflow also provides fast and secure hosting with a global CDN, so your site will comply with Google’s best practices and load fast from every corner of the world.

This frees up your time from having to manage all of that, and you can work more on increasing domain authority.

The only thing you’ll have to do from a technical standpoint is to connect your own domain. If you’ve been running your Webflow site on the free subdomain that is issued to every website, you’ll have to change it to a new domain.

Purchase a suitable domain name that fits your brand, either via Webflow or from GoDaddy or another registrar, and connect it to your website.

The reason is that you build the domain authority of the domain you link to, and transferring it from yourbrand.webflow.com to yourbrand.com takes a lot of effort and isn’t as effective as building links to the domain directly.

If you’ve done that already, here’s a guide on how to increase the domain authority of your Webflow website.

Build High-Quality Backlinks

The most important thing you can do for your site’s domain authority score is to build a lot of high-quality backlinks. The principle here is pretty simple: the more authority websites that link to yours have, the more authority your website will gain.

The trick here is to gauge the quality of a potential link source and find a way to get a link from that website.

Sometimes, the quality of a website is self-evident. For instance, large news sites like Forbes or The Washington Post are obviously authoritative from Google’s perspective, and getting a link from one of those would be great for SEO.

With most other websites, you have to rely on a variety of factors. The basic factors are:

• Domain authority
• Relevance
• Uniqueness

The last two are the easiest to understand and control. 

Most backlinks should be relevant to whatever your website is about. For example, if your business sells dog collars, the websites pointing to your site should revolve around pets and pet care. If you run a marketing agency, the links pointing to it should mostly be from digital marketing blogs.

It’s fine if some links are from unrelated websites, but if they comprise most of your backlink profile, it could be bad for domain authority.

Links should also be surrounded by unique text. Google might penalize your website if you repost the same article with a link on dozens of websites. So make sure the websites you get links from don’t use duplicate content and that you don’t use it yourself.

You can use a domain authority checker like the one by SE Ranking to measure your current score. This tool calls this metric Domain Trust and calculates it based on the number and quality of links pointing to the site. It can also show these metrics for any website you want to analyze:

• The number of backlinks
• The number of referring domains
• Projected traffic volume by country
• The number of keywords the website ranks for
• Average position on the SERP
• The number of indexed pages
• Domain age

All of these metrics are important for gauging the overall quality of the website you can get a link from, especially the projected traffic numbers. Ranking well for multiple keywords and receiving decent traffic means Google considers the website authoritative enough. Getting a link from it will benefit your domain rating and might result in some referral traffic.

We’ve established that you need to check website quality before building links, but how do you find them? There are two methods for that.

First, you can google “your industry + blog + “write for us” to find websites that publish contributor content. Usually, they allow at least one link to your site from the content you publish.

A faster way to find websites that can give you a link is to check a competitor with a backlink checker tool and get a list of domains that refer to it. Then, delete websites that aren’t relevant to yours and check the rest for domain authority.

You can use that list to build links in a variety of ways. Here are the most effective ways to increase domain authority with link-building.

Basic links. These are links you can get with little to no effort from database websites.

• Business directories
• Review websites
• Event websites

Links earned through content. These link-building techniques revolve around you creating content for the website you want to get a link from.

• Guest posting on industry blogs
• Writing a column for a news site or blog
• Giving comments to journalists on sites like HARO

Advanced link-building techniques. These techniques require expert use of SEO tools and large volumes of outreach.

• Broken link-building
• Insertions in resource or review lists
• Reclaiming unlinked mentions

This concludes the major part of what you can do to increase the domain authority of your site. But there are still some important smaller things to do.

Diversify Backlink Profile

Domain authority relies not only on the quality and the number of links but also on the diversity of links pointing to your website.

It’s okay if in the first couple of months you only get one type of link, often those you build through guest posting. But after a year, it’s best if you gather different types of links. Apart from links from industry blogs, you want to have links from directories, and social media sites. Take part in discussions online and post your content on company pages to get those links.

This way, Google understands your website has a natural presence across the web, and you don’t just build a couple of links here and there.

Ideally, you want to have both dofollow and nofollow links pointing to multiple pages.

Focus on Quality Content Creation

Building links by reaching out to websites and creating contributor content for them is a valid tactic, but it requires a lot of research and effort to build links at scale. To build links at scale, create content that is worth linking to. Ideally, other writers and editors will pick up that content piece and link to it in their work.

The best types of Webflow SEO content that might earn you dozens of links are:

• Exhaustive guides on a single topic
• Case studies
• Research reports
• Resource pages with industry data
• Interactive tools and widgets

When you create a piece of content like that, you’ll have to promote it quite heavily at first. Use all the channels you have at your disposal to do that. Include it in your newsletter, post it on social media, and reach out to other editors with a link to the content.

Optimize Pages for Traffic

Some tools include the amount of traffic in their evaluation of domain authority. Even if that’s not the case with the tool you use, the end goal of increasing domain authority is increasing rankings and traffic, so this step is a must in any case.

To optimize your page, you’ll have to include the keywords it should appear for in the body of the page, in the SEO tags like the title tag, the meta description tag, and in the alt tags of images. You have to do keyword research yourself, but Webflow provides the tools to automate adding keywords to your pages.

It also gives you a tool that can automate the creation of schema markup. Schema is a JSON document that tells Google more technical information about the page and helps with its indexing. It can also help introduce a SERP feature like this navigation.

Webflow can automate the process of creating those files and add information about your website without your involvement.

Monitor and Reduce Bad Links

Finally, you should monitor your backlink profile for bad links as they can bring your domain authority down. Sometimes, your article will become popular and hundreds of spammy websites will steal it and leave internal links to your pages. Sometimes, spammy, low-quality websites link to hundreds of good websites to try to manipulate domain authority.

Do a monthly check, and if you find an influx of links from websites that look shady and have very low domain authority, go to the Google Disavow Tool and disavow those links. This will tell Google not to consider them, and they won’t affect your domain authority.

Good Domain Authority Score Leads to Good Ranking

Domain authority, or domain trust, is a useful metric that allows you to gauge your off-page SEO success and compare your site to others. Increasing it will result in higher rankings, more traffic, and eventually more conversions.

To increase domain authority, build high-quality, diverse links, and disavow any poor links that appear. Don’t forget to optimize your website and work on on-page SEO factors, as well as it’s one of the components of success on Google.

Give the techniques from this article a try and measure your core SEO metrics with Webflow SEO tools to see them work for yourself.