What is Domain Authority?
Domain Authority (DA) is a term developed by Moz that is used to evaluate how effective your dealership website’s SEO efforts are. Your DA sits on a scale between 0-100. New auto dealer sites all start with a DA of 1 despite how much content might be on it when it’s published. This means it takes time to increase your DA. Only a few of the most popular websites like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia have a DA of 100, so don’t get discouraged if your dealership’s website doesn’t reach 100. Your DA is always changing depending on over 40 factors that go into calculating it.
Why is your DA important?
Your Domain Authority effects your search engine rank which effects your website traffic which effects your conversions and sales which effects the bottom line of your car dealership. That’s a long chain of things that are influenced by your DA. When your DA is high, you will rank higher in SERPs, and that will give your site more traffic. Having a high Domain Authority increases the credibility of your auto dealership, allows you to keep sharing new content, and increases conversion rates. A high DA score also indicates that your brand equity is high, and it gives potential car buyers a better chance of seeing and clicking on your website. Car dealers should check their DA at least once a month to see where it’s at.
What determines your dealership website’s DA?
There are many indicators that help determine the Domain Authority score for each website. Your new or used car dealership should pay special attention to the following SEO factors to achieve and maintain a high DA.
- Page rank
- Links
- Content
- Page speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Domain age
How can your auto dealership improve its Domain Authority?
1. Content
Your blog posts’ content makes a big impact on your DA. Your dealership should focus on posting quality, original content that is interesting and useful for potential car buyers. Your customers want to read information that helps them in some way or answers their questions. You, as a car dealer, should do your research before writing an article to ensure that you have the most up-to-date sources. Videos, pictures, and infographics can enhance your reader’s experience when they land on your site. You should include examples to make it easier for potential car buyers to understand your articles. Engaging posts can improve your DA drastically and keep your audience fascinated.
2. Linking
Internal and external links influence your Domain Authority in a big way. For example, Wikipedia has several internal links on each of their pages, and they have a DA of 100. This goes to show that links serve a very important purpose. Quality links prove that your blog post is relevant and decrease your bounce rates. When you link to some of your auto dealership’s previous posts, it also keeps readers on your site longer.
You should strive to make your content linkable. Try to write quality blog posts on subjects that apply to a variety of people and businesses. When other websites link to your posts, it improves your DA. However, be careful with backlinks. You should spend as much time deleting bad links as you do creating good links. When Google sees that your website is linked to websites that are spam, it will hurt your DA. Pay attention, and try to only generate quality backlinks.
3. Posting
To maintain a consistent DA, you should post blog articles regularly. Always having fresh, new content helps your dealership improve its DA and its rankings on SERPs. Another thing that will help your DA is guest posting. Posting quality content on Q&A sites can help both your potential customers and your own car dealer website. When you guest post, make sure not to stuff your article with too many keywords. You should only guest post with good links and unique content on credible sites.
No matter how great your content is, it won’t have much of an impact if no one sees it. Therefore, you should promote your articles by posting them on social media sites. This gives your dealership’s work a chance to go viral and get shared, liked, and retweeted by car buyers in your area. Take advantage of the opportunity to share your content with people who are interested.
When your car dealership’s website is brand new, it is relatively easy to bring up your DA number since it starts at 1. It gets increasingly hard to improve your DA once your score passes 50. These tips can help your dealership improve and maintain your DA since it’s always changing. Remember, you want quality content, relevant links, and premium promotion for each of your blog posts.