In today’s bustling and competitive digital world, every niche has certain fundamental principles or parameters in place to assess a business’s credibility. In the SEO industry, Domain Rating (DR) is one of the key metrics and ranking factors used by SEO experts to evaluate a website’s strength and authority and, consequently, its ranking potential.
To stay afloat in the saturated online landscape and eventually rise to the top of the SERPs, you’ll need a high DR score. Keep reading to find out why it plays such a significant role in SEO and learn how to boost your Domain Rating to launch your website to success.
What Is Domain Rating and How Does It Work?
Domain Rating, or DR for short, is a key SEO analyzing metric developed by Ahrefs that determines a website’s relative strength and authority. It is calculated by evaluating a website’s backlinks profile, social shares, age, content quality, and other relevant data.
Just like Domain Authority (DA), domain rating is measured on a scale from 0–100. As its creator, Ahref’s DR tool is the optimal choice to gauge this metric and determine the worth of a website in terms of backlinks and overall health.
Why Is Having a High Domain Rating Important?
Assessing your domain rating is a crucial piece of the SEO puzzle, as it can help you test new campaigns’ performance or benchmark existing campaigns’ performance. But why does having a high domain rating matter? The math is simple – websites with a higher DR score indicate a robust, high-quality backlinks profile and speak of greater authority.
Since DR is a subjective score invented by a third-party company (Ahrefs), it’s not a direct ranking factor in the eyes of Google. However, it remains one of the key indicators when gauging a website’s “ranking potential”. Reputable, quality backlinks act as a digital “vote of confidence,” indicating value, credibility, and authority. And having “authority” in SEO keeps the search engines happy and is the secret sauce for high search engine ranking.
A higher domain rating can help you rank higher in SERPs in many ways, which helps you attract more visitors and clicks, thus, driving more traffic, improving your visibility and reputation, and, ultimately, your digital marketing funnel. If you have a high DR, you can even take advantage of your own link juice by internal linking. A high domain rating indicates trustworthiness and authoritativeness, which also helps you rank higher for competitive keywords.
Tried and True: Top 5 Ways to Skyrocket Your Domain Rating
If you’re looking to boost your SEO, you need to power it by improving your domain rating score. Although not a direct ranking factor, domain rating acts like a compass that points you in the right direction – a higher domain rating score means that you are taking the right SEO steps and improving your chances of Google ranking your website higher in search results.
There are several ways to step up your DR game and boost your domain rating score:
1. Killer Link building
Since the strength of your backlink profile is one of the main things DR analysis looks at, obtaining high-quality links from reputable and authoritative websites relevant to your niche is a must if you want to improve your domain rating. Focus on building “do-follow” links directly to the pages that you want to rank in Google, as it impacts organic traffic and rankings more heavily. If you don’t have the time or skills it takes to build a robust backlink profile that will amp up your DR, you can learn more about premium link-building services to get one.
Don’t stop there – besides landing quality external links that speak volumes, strengthening your URL structure by internal linking within your own content is key for boosting your DR score. Although DR correlates strongly with a website’s search traffic, you should not solely focus your efforts on growing this specific metric since Google ranks pages, not websites. So, direct some of that “authority” link juice to important, relevant pages you want to rank with internal links.
Having quality and relevant pages armed with killer content that is valuable and link-worthy and has a proper interlinking structure that is helpful to users is the recipe for SEO success. Not only will it lead users along their customer journey, but also help you build the authority you need to grow your traffic and boost your SEO efforts even further.
2. A Clean Link Structure
Before you start boosting your DR with strong links, you need a clean slate. While strong internal and inbound links are vital for your website’s domain rating and rankings, having bad links can flush all your link-building efforts down the drain. Spammy backlinks from websites with low DR and DA can decrease your website’s domain authority and even get you penalized by Google.
So, make sure you audit your website for any broken links or toxic links and fix them ASAP. There are numerous different SEO tools you can use to detect harmful links by going through your website’s complete link profile.
3. Optimized Website Structure & UX
Since one of the factors that get analyzed when calculating domain rating is your site’s structure and its user-friendliness, having a well-structured, responsive, and mobile-friendly website is no longer optional. You need to optimize your website structure so that search engines can easily crawl your web pages and index them on search results.
You also need to optimize your website’s user experience so that it’s easily accessible on all devices or risk losing a lot of traffic and authority and, thus, having a low domain rating score. You can even take it up a notch by making it accessible to people with disabilities, like using voice optimization and widgets to offer your disabled visitors a seamless user experience.
Try not to get too carried away with website optimization – technical SEO is still a crucial piece of the puzzle, even when it comes to DR. Regularly check and optimize key SEO metrics like your site’s speed, tags, meta description, and so on to sends signals to the search engine bots that your content is trustworthy, reliable and high-quality. Which brings us to our next point.
4. High-quality & Link-Worthy Content
Content is king, but only when done right. To get the most link juice out of your link-building efforts and more authority by walking the talk, you’ll need to create content that people actually want to read, share and link to. To get the DR appraisal it deserves, your content needs to address topics with a history of getting links, be up-to-date, original, engaging, and helpful to users optimized with target keywords with a high Keyword Difficulty (KD) score.
Most of a domain’s rating is built on organic search engine traffic, which you can tap into with optimized, high-quality content worth sharing. So, aim your efforts at producing high-quality content, securing high-quality backlinks directly to that content, and amping it up with internal linking. As a result, both your DR and your search traffic will grow naturally.
5. Diverse Social Media Presence
If your users find your content in multiple different formats during a search, it can increase your domain rating since you’re diversifying content exposure and, thus, opening new doors for more traffic and visibility by re-telling your story in different formats and catering to different audiences.
Having a reputable presence across popular social media channels like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter can help you get more signals that can significantly improve your domain score and increase site authority. After all, you’ll be honing in on more visibility, traffic, likes, shares, trustworthiness, authority – you name it!
It All Boils Down to Top-Notch SEO
It’s not all about scores – domain rating is not the be-all-and-end-all, nor does it directly impact your ranking, but it’s incredibly useful for making informed SEO decisions as a good indicator of the health of a domain and how well it might rank in search engines.
Use it to your advantage and kill two birds with one stone – improve your domain rating score to successfully boost your SEO strategy and efforts.
