5 Ultimate Tips to Increase Your Dental Website’s Domain Authority

Appearing credible online is essential to building a solid online reputation and gaining the trust of potential patients. However, your dental website needs to impress more than just the customers. In order to gain traction online and generate organic traffic and leads, your site needs to appeal to search engine algorithms. This can be accomplished by increasing your domain authority.

In simple terms, a search engine algorithm is a set of steps that search engines use to determine the quality of a website and how highly it should be ranked on search engine results pages (SERPs). Domain authority is a way to help understand how search engines view your site, allowing you to make necessary changes.

Confused? Don’t worry – this article explains the ins and outs of domain authority, including five ultimate tips to increase your dental website’s domain authority.

Keep reading to learn more.

What Is Domain Authority?

A website’s domain authority (DA) indicates its relevance and value relative to other sites operating in the same industry. It’s a common misconception that domain authority directly impacts a website’s SERP rankings. In reality, domain authority is a metric used to determine the strength of a website’s content and its chances of ranking highly.

Although a high DA does not necessarily mean a high SERP position, considerations that increase DA typically result in websites ranking higher, which is why it’s essential to make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) considerations that positively impact your SERP rankings.

What Is Page Authority?

After reading the above definition of domain authority, you can likely guess the meaning behind page authority (PA). To clarify, page authority indicates the relevance and usefulness of a specific web page and its content instead of the authority of the entire website. Like DA, PA is also not a direct SERP ranking factor, though it  does play a part in identifying areas for SEO improvements.

How Is Domain Authority Calculated?

Depending on the SEO tool you’re using, domain authority may be calculated differently. Ahrefs and Moz – each with varying calculations – are the two most prominent platforms for checking DA. As Moz is the platform that initially developed the DA metric, we’ll use their domain authority formula as an example.

Moz Calculation

Moz adds the following metrics together and plots them on a scale of zero to 100 – the worst possible score and the best, respectively.

Number of Linking Root Domains

Root domains are the highest hierarchical level of domain found within a website. In plain English, that usually means the address attributed to a site’s homepage. For example, thedentalseoexperts.com. Root domains are removed from the hypertext protocol (HTTP/HTTPS) and any sub-pages, i.e., thedentalseoexperts.com/dental-seo-services/seo/.

Moz identifies how many external root domain pages – or the landing pages of other websites – are linking to your site. The more linking root domains, the more authoritative your website appears, boosting your DA score. This closely ties into the next Moz calculation factor.

Number of Total Backlinks

Like the number of linking root domains, total backlinks denote the number of websites that link to a page on your site regardless of domain type. You may have heard of the link-building practice in SEO digital marketing, as it’s an excellent way to generate organic traffic by utilizing another website’s audience.

The Moz DA calculation considers how many total backlinks your website receives to determine the value of your content. Generally, the more backlinks a website receives, the more credible and trustworthy its content is.

MozRank

Like domain authority, MozRank, and the below MozTrust, is a metric created by Moz to help SEO professionals evaluate the effectiveness of their digital marketing strategies. Unlike DA, Moz Rank is plotted on a scale of one to ten, and is ultimately based on how much traffic the website receives through the popularity of its inbound links.

MozTrust

MozTrust is similar to MozRank in that it too evaluates the quality of backlinks to your website. However, where MozRank assesses link popularity, MozTrust identifies link trust. In other words, MozTrust evaluates the website’s credibility linking to yours. For example, receiving backlinks for government pages or scientific journals shows that your site has a solid level of credibility.

How to Check Your Domain Authority Score

After reading the above section, it may not surprise you that Moz has a domain authority analysis tool freely available on their website. However, there are several other excellent DA and SEO management tools available, including:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Small SEO Tools
• Site Checker

You can also contact The Dental SEO Experts team for a comprehensive SEO website audit and digital marketing consultation.

Why Is Domain Authority Important for Your Dental Website?

Getting direct insight into a search engine’s view of your website is challenging, meaning it’s difficult to understand which of your Search Engine Optimization considerations are working and which aren’t. Fortunately, domain authority is a way of gauging the success of your SEO efforts and gaining an insight into how search engines view your website. That way, you can make the necessary adjustments based on known search engine ranking factors and domain authority considerations. 

If your website has a low domain authority, it’s likely that there is an issue with your SEO marketing efforts or that your site is still young. You can seek guidance from an SEO marketing agency or online tools, such as Moz, or make adjustments based on your existing knowledge. To surmise, domain authority is a crucial part of assessing and improving your online marketing efforts.

5 Ultimate Tips to Increase Your Dental Website’s Domain Authority

There are many ways to increase your domain authority, but the following five are some of the most important considerations that will improve both your DA and SERP rankings.

     1. Create Valuable Content

Valuable content is any content posted to your website that provides genuinely useful or entertaining information to users. Search engines like Google favor useful content because it’s more likely to retain user interest. As a result, valuable content can also be referred to as linkable content because of its likelihood of generating external citations.

As per the above discussion of DA calculations, it should come as no surprise that any consideration that benefits inbound links generally improves domain authority. This is due to the increased user retention time and inbound links finding favorability with search engines. So, despite the common temptation to position content solely for SEO purposes, creating valuable content is typically more effective.

     2. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Building high-quality links means generating inbound links from credible websites with solid domain authorities like government and scientific sources, as identified by MozTrust. However, we at The Dental SEO Experts understand that building trustworthy backlinks is easier said than done. That’s why we offer expert backlink-building services as part of our comprehensive SEO packages. 

Guest-posting is one of the easiest ways to build inbound links. This is the practice of posting keyword-rich articles on an external blog site with links to your website. While it may be a relatively simple tactic, it does require you to research and find blog sites that accept article submissions. Once found, you should run the blog site through a DA checker like Moz. If it has a high DA of 60 or above, it’s considered a credible website and can provide your dental website with high-quality backlinks. 

     3. Build Social Signals

Social signals indicate how much momentum and interest your clinic generates on social media platforms. This primarily includes how many times your posts are shared, post links clicked, and your follower count. Building such signals requires social media marketing (SMM) considerations. However, SMM considerations should vary depending on the platform you’re using. Here is a brief breakdown of the type of content suited to each social media platform:

• Facebook: Video and long-form content, i.e., links to articles above 1500 words.
• Instagram: Carousel photo posts (multiple photos in one post) and Instagram Reels.
• Twitter: Short-form text and video.
• YouTube: Long-form videos of ten minutes or more.
• LinkedIn: Blog posts and business-related content. 

For a more in-depth guide to SMM, check out our top eight dental social media marketing ideas.

     4. Audit and Remove Bad Links

A bad link points users to an irrelevant webpage or one that provides them with no value. Search engines easily identify bad links, which reduce your SERP scores and negatively impact your domain authority. For example, if your dental website were to link to a construction website simply for the purpose of including links, Google would identify this as spam content. As we learned earlier, search engines favor valuable content, and this extends to your site’s link structure.

Often, websites point to bad links by mistake. For example, they may link to a website with low credibility. As a result, it’s crucial to regularly audit your website to identify and remove these links yourself before search engines notice them. To run an audit, you can contact a specialist SEO agency or use an online site analysis tool such as Ahrefs. 

     5. Use Internal Linking

Internal linking is the practice of linking to other internal web pages using anchor text (hyperlinked text). Internal links help search engines like Google to build a clear image of your website and which pages are most important. Using descriptive and clear anchor text, you can signal importance and page content to search engines. For example, linking to a blog post using the anchor text “this article” will not provide search engines with any indication as to the contents of the link, signaling a lack of importance. Anchor text should be descriptive and relevant to the linked content. 

Without including internal links, search engines will struggle to fully understand the structure and content of your site, with only metadata as an indicator. (Metadata is the page title and description that appears in search results pages.) Though this information is useful, correct use of internal links helps to boost the rankings of your most crucial pages, such as service and consultation pages. The same applies to your DA score, meaning your domain authority helps you to identify whether or not search engines understand your website.

Increase Your Domain Authority and Generate Patient Leads with The Dental SEO Experts

After reading this article, we hope that you have a better grasp of domain authority and how it can be increased. However, at The Dental SEO Experts, we’re here to alleviate the burden of digital marketing by providing specialist SEO and SMM services. We have a team of digital marketing professionals dedicated to providing exceptional services, so you can focus on running your dental practice. Schedule a call with us today to learn more.