How Your Domain Authority Affects Your Firm

Learning about the latest and greatest search engine optimization (SEO) metrics may not be on the top of every busy lawyer’s list, but it’s important if you want to improve your firm’s rankings on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, even moving up just one spot in the SERPs can increase your click-through rate by almost 31%, so you may be missing out on potential clients if you’re not making SEO a priority.

While there are lots of different metrics to keep an eye on, the focus of this article will be one of the most misunderstood ones: domain authority, or DA. Keep reading to learn more about this important metric, and how it ultimately affects your firm.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a metric developed by Moz that’s used to predict how well a website will rank in SERPs. The closer a website’s DA score is to 100, the more likely it’ll rank.

Your domain authority is calculated based on a number of factors, but it mainly seems to be focused on the quality and quantity of links directed at your website. For example, a brand new website would begin with a DA of 1, and this would increase as they attain more links.

While your website’s DA does tend to be a good indication of your rankings on Google’s SERPs, it’s important to understand that it has nothing to do with Google’s algorithm. Google doesn’t use DA to calculate its page rankings, so a high DA doesn’t automatically mean a high ranking. Your DA is merely a prediction of your organic search rankings, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t directly match Google’s SERPs.

Why Should My Law Firm Care About Domain Authority?

If you’re trying to climb to the top of those SERPs (and you should be!), then it’s important to pay attention to your DA score. The reason why it’s such a good prediction of SERP rankings is its focus on links, as the number and quality of the links pointing to your website is one of the most important ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. So, if lots of highly reputable websites are linking to your content, then the algorithm is likely going to rank you higher on the SERPs. This makes your DA score an excellent estimate of your page rankings.

It’s also a great indicator of what you may need to do SEO-wise for your firm. For example, if you find that your DA score is on the lower side, then you may want to start implementing some strategies to increase the number of quality links to your site.

How Do I Increase My Firm’s DA Score?

The best thing to do to increase your DA score is to engage in link building with other reputable websites. Each time they post a link to your law firm’s site they are increasing your authority, and therefore your DA score. If you don’t already know the owners of other relevant, authoritative law sites, then reach out to them and see if you could do a guest blog post in return for a link, or negotiate some other type of deal.

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