WTF is website authority and how to build it?

Read time: 4 minutes

Back in our school days, we used to have something called- The student council, which had ranks like President, vice president and so on.

Whoever was elected as the president had more authority than others.

Or someone in the class was always more influential and a star performer.

Imagine your website is a student in school: A high authority score means it's popular and influential, like the star athlete or the president of the council.

No one became the president overnight.

It takes time and consistency.

So will your website.

Think of website authority as the popularity score of your website.

This score shows how likely your website will appear at the top of search results.

Vintage will always have a role to play in building the authority.

The biggest challenge with Website authority is:

There is no Google-verified quantitative metric that one can refer to.

Some tools and metrics that calculate the authority of a website are: MOZ, an SEO company, created something called Domain Authority (DA), which scores websites from 1 to 100 on how likely they are to rank in search results.

Ahrefs, another company, has a similar metric called Domain Rating (DR), which focuses on a site's "link popularity."

Google, the big boss of search engines, doesn't directly use these scores to rank websites.

But, the things these scores look at, like the quality of your backlinks, are important to Google.

Ahrefs did a study and found that websites with higher Domain Ratings often rank higher in search results.

This is because Google still uses something called PageRank, which also cares about links.

A website’s authority is built by focusing on 2 things:

1. Backlinks- Relevancy is more important than the quality of the domain

2. Strong content architecture- the deeper you go on one topic, the higher the authority of your website

While building backlinks for your website:

Look Beyond the Score: A high authority score doesn't always mean a backlink is good. Check other things like how much traffic the other website gets or how relevant it is to your topic.

Don't Shun Low-Score Sites: Sometimes, getting a backlink from a lower-score website is still good, especially if it's very relevant to your topic.

The bottom line is- Focus on Relevancy with Backlinks.

While creating Strong content architecture, remember, that if one topic or theme is core to your business, you have to go deep into decoding that on your website.

Break down these topics/themes as much as you can.

Good websites, define their website architecture based on these themes/topics.

For ex., if skincare is an important theme for you because you sell anti-ageing serum. Go deep into the skincare topic.

Define the structure of your blogs around skincare and break it down as per the searches that happen in and around skincare.

Here is how you break it down:

Write detailed, high-quality, medically-verified articles under each of these topics.

You can further break down these topics to add more authority to your content.

For ex., Skincare + Routine has 9.2k variations and a volume of 1M.

Break this further down and have separate pages on:

• Morning skincare routine (with its own set of primary + secondary keywords)

• Night Skincare routine (with its own set of primary + secondary keywords)

• Basic skincare routine (with its own set of primary + secondary keywords)

• Korean skincare routine (with its own set of primary + secondary keywords)

• Men’s skincare routine (with its own set of primary + secondary keywords)

• Skincare routine for dry skin (with its own set of primary + secondary keywords)

  and so on.

Add infographics, and videos to build on experience and expertise.

Add author details to add more authority.

Ideally, anything which belongs to health or finance needs to have an expert validation.

The way Helahtline does it, with each article, you will have details of an expert who has either written the article or has medically reviewed it.

I’d say even if you do not belong to the health or finance category, still add author details and link to the profile page of the author along with her credentials. This always helps in establishing credibility and therefore authority of the website.

The deeper you go into one theme, the more authority you will be able to develop over a while.

While you focus on building authority, do not ignore the importance of building credibility too.

Website credibility refers to how trustworthy and reliable a website appears to its visitors. It's about whether people believe the information the website provides and feel confident in using it.

If I have to outline the basic difference between Website authority and Website credibility, I will present it like this:

I love the study Stanford Business School did some time back on-

How to boost website credibility.

They outlined the top 10 ways in which websites can build credibility which is relatively easier to build compared to a website’s authority and is faster too.

10 ways to boost your website’s credibility:

Get access to the full list of Stanford’s website credibility report

Very few websites can drive both website authority and website credibility together.

Today If I get a new project to work on, from developing the website to running numbers from it, this is a strong foundation I’d lay.

As I have always said:

That’s it for today, folks!

Last week I posted a YouTube video on:

Why no one is talking about Retention Marketing?

Watch as I share my opinion on this important channel that helps you drive customer lifecycle management.

The video is in Hindi with English subtitles.

Cheers,

Apurv