Has anybody ever seen (or written) a case study on increasing domain authority?

[RichAlive]

I am an in-house digital marketer for a small business in the UK. The majority of our business comes from people finding us on Google's organic SERPs for relevant search terms.

Our website has been around since 1999 and we have established a great base of keyword rankings in that time from key vanity keywords in our field that generate a tonne of long tail rankings for the product pages on our site.

Last year, I was given the target of increasing our websites DA from 40(something) to 60+ by the end of the year. I put a plan together at the start of the year which included things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', do 'proper' link building, do 'real' PR, make sure technical SEO is all up to scratch, increase CTR, reduce bounce rate etc etc

But... I wanted to find some examples of case studies where SEO's had taken a site with a starting DA of 'whatever' and increased it to 'a way higher whatever'.

I found a tonne of 'How to increase your domain authority' type blog posts which said things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', 'do proper link building' etc etc but no hard data case studies from people who had been successful in doing it!

I really just wanted to make sure that the plan I was putting together, was focused on the right things!

Does anybody know of any case studies? I'm still keen to check them out.

Being a small business, it's often the case that once we've put a plan together, we quickly realize that we don't have the resources, time, personnel or budget to follow it through but at lest having the plan confirmed by successful case studies doing the same thing or similar would really encouraging!

Thanks,
Rich

[MattRoney]

I'm not personally aware of any case studies that specifically cover raising Domain Authority, but that doesn't mean someone else here isn't.

I feel like I should caution you, though, that raising DA to a concrete goal that isn't benchmarked against your competitors is likely to be pretty frustrating. Because DA is scored on a logarithmic scale, what constitutes 100—the highest score—gets more and more difficult to achieve as we index the web, and as the sites at the top continue to build authority.

The best advice I can give you when setting your DA goals is to first determine the DAs of the sites you're directly competing with for SERP space, then focus on overtaking them. If you're in a field with sites at DA 45 doing very well, then it might not make sense to expend efforts hitting 60. Does that make sense?

[Mobilio]

TL;DR -your DA is small because your business is small. Period.

Domain authority is just a number. PR is also number.

You can rank very well also with little DA, same is with PR. Focusing with DA improvements is meaningless because DA can become higher with links/linkbuilding. And links can be earned with good content or forced with SEO linkbuilders. This definitely can improve little bit your DA. Even in SEO there is term "PR sculpting".

Playing with DA and site is same as "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". If your site grows with links then DA will be increased. But growing from 40 to 50 is same as growing from 0 to 40 as links. And from 50 -> 60 is same as 0 to 50. All happening due their logarithmic scale for parameters. And this require huge works.

So let's go back on "chicken/egg" problem - you can improve DA if you get links from trusted newspapers with sites as Guardian, Independent, Mirror, Daily Express, Telegraph, etc. Also can be trusted magazines with sites - Glamour, Elle, Wired, etc. You can get links from TVs - BBC, ITV, C4, C5, etc. You can get links sponsoring events - like BigBrother, X-Factor, etc. Then your DA will become higher. Now let's face question again - you're small and to make that media to talk about you need to grow to national wide and become giant in your niche.

And how you grow is different story that we can't answer without market research, financial analysis and some forecasts.

[MattRoney]

Just to follow up—you've probably seen it, but our overview of Domain Authority might clarify things a bit. Also, though it's specifically meant to address unexplained fluctuations in DA/PA, this post by Rand will help explain the implications of the logarithmic scale.

[RichAlive]

Thanks Matt. You pretty much said what I was thinking! It was a frustrating target! Made all the more frustrating by the fact that the plan I put together, I believe would have moved the needle but very quickly, being a small business, we have to shift to work on whatever is the most important thing right now!

We're in a niche where our DA fluctuates between 40 - 50 and we are pretty much always above our competitors by a good way.

Our target was 60+ actually and I think we possibly could achieve it (or at least move towards it) if we had the time and skills to do better link building (as described by Peter below) and basically, as I've heard Rand say on numerous occasions, simply do better marketing ; )

[RichAlive]

Thanks Peter. I think you're right - We need better link building to be our focus and DA increase will follow.

The business is growing : ) and so will our DA.

In fact, maybe I'll do a case study on increasing DA at some point in the next 12 to 24 months ; )

[Mobilio]

Good luck with that!

And i will share one little secret. If you need to grow from 40 to 60 you need links from domains with DA above 70. Because that domains will be counted higher for growing. As i said before how you get them is another story.

PS: I may sound little bit rude but i'm faced similar problems and i working to get links, traffic grows. Meanwhile DA falling. Strange world.