Propeller’s advice on establishing SEO authority for your site

Make sure you E-E-A-T

When considering SEO authority, it is best to abide by Google’s recently updated E-E-A-T principal: Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. This is a fundamental part of Google’s algorithm, deciphering the quality of each website.

Before we get into the thick of establishing authority, let’s start at the beginning. Coined by the SaaS company Moz, domain and page authority predict how websites rank in search results on search engines. Essentially, page authority measures the ranking potential of specific pages, while domain authority measures the potential of an entire website.

From the quality-of-content to backlinks, our SEO experts have prepared some guidelines to help you maximise your potential in both areas. In this article, we consider the best practices in SEO authority and what this can achieve for your digital presence.

Let’s explore the two different types of authority, and understand what helps them grow:

Also known as website authority, this refers to a ranking system, introduced to predict how a website will rank on search engines. Moz developed a domain authority ranking system which assigns a website a score from 1 to 100 to signify the relevance of the website in their industry or a specific topic. Websites with a high score have a greater chance of performing well on search engines results pages (SERPS) and getting more organic traffic. To understand what a good domain authority score is, consider the following markers:

• Below 30 – Poor
• 30 to 40 – Below average
• 40 to 50 – Average
• 50 to 60 – Good
• 60 to 70 – Very good
• 70 to 80 – Excellent
• 80 to 100 – Perfect

If you are interested, you can try Moz’s free domain SEO analysis tool to see where you currently rank.

Since this scale is a predictive measure, it is best used for understanding how you rank against your competitors. As long as you are scoring higher than them, you can expect your content to achieve its purpose.

Here are a few pointers for improving domain authority:

• IMPROVE YOUR INTERNAL LINKS – Focusing on your internal linking structure to direct users to other relevant web pages on your site will help boost your time on content (TOC), and maintain your audience’s interests. This also makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl through your website and index your website’s pages.
• BUILD BACKLINKS – Building backlinks is important, however it is also important that these backlinks are sourced from relevant, high authority domains. Unique backlinks are more valuable than numerous links from the same domain.
• IMPLEMENT A CLEAR SITE STRUCTURE – You need to make sure that your site structure is easy for search engines like Google to crawl the pages of your site. This will also help you provide a great user experience to your site’s visitors.

While domain authority measures the strength of an entire domain, page authority looks at the strength of an individual page. Put simply, to build on your domain authority, you should ensure that each page on your website is also adhering to the best SEO practices.

It is worth noting that if you are looking at page authority ranking, this is scored on a logarithmic scale. This means it is easier to increase your score from 1 to 10, but a lot more difficult to raise it from 70 to 80.

Importantly, page authority ranking does not consider specific on-page elements like keyword use or content optimization. Instead it looks more to the following:

• IMPROVE ITS LINK PROFILE – If a website posts a link to one of your blog posts in an article, this can bring increased visitors to your site. You can increase the opportunity to make this happen by guest blogging for relevant websites and working with websites you already have a connection with. External links from high-quality sites are considered a strong indicator of quality, boosting your page authority.
• CREATE ORIGINAL CONTENT – You need to create high-quality content that is relevant to your brand, and you need to post new content on a regular basis. The better your content ends up being, the more likely it is to be shared, commented or liked by readers – and the more likely other sites are to link to said page as well as gain returning visitors to your site the next time you post.
• SPREAD THE LINK JUICE – No, this was not a typo. Link juice refers to link equity across your website. By using strategic internal links, you can help distribute authority across your site by linking pages with higher ranking authority with lower ones.
• USE IMAGES – Using images, especially ones that are original, will make your page more shareable; people are more likely to share visual content over purely written content. Additionally, when posting content links on social media, accompanying images make the post stand out more. Images also improve SEO: Using ALT text to describe what your image is for Google will improve a page’s ability to generate more traffic to the site.

There are certain mistakes that can have a large impact on your domain and page authority. Here are some of the factors that our SEO specialists have noticed:

• LACK OF ACTIVITY – Google has explained in the past that it values “the most relevant, useful results”. If your website has not been updated for a long period of time, it is unlikely you will appear in any searches – particularly if the topic is highly competitive and/or time relative.
• KEYWORD STUFFING – There is a balance between not using a keyword enough, and completely overloading it across your domain. Stuffing your website with the same keywords will have a negative impact on your ranking potential. The percentage of keyword density that qualifies as keyword stuffing is not well-defined as it can vary based on multiple factors such as the length of the content, the topic etc. However, as a general rule of thumb, you should never aim to go higher than 5–7% density.
• NOT OPTIMISING OLD CONTENT – When looking back at older content, you should audit whether links still work and whether that content is up to date. If it has not performed as well as you would have hoped, repurpose it to create new content. These practices can help boost the older content’s relevance and performance in search.

Auditing and working to improve your page authority will help put your web pages in a better position to rank better in SERP. However, establishing SEO authority is not a quick-fix. Building domain and page authority is a long game, one that will be worthwhile for climbing in SERP.

We delight in the details and build cohesive digital solutions with thorough research that refines your audience for a greater reach. As well as delivering on development, SEO, PPC performance and analytics, we utilise a testing framework to see what engages your customers and how we can adapt as this changes.

Contact us to collaborate with a team of SEO specialists to build optimised and scalable SEO strategies, driven by data and keywords that soars brands to the top of the search engine pages.