What Is Domain Authority and How Is It Relevant to Law Firms?

SEO is one of the most essential factors for successful digital marketing. Domain authority is a big component of SEO, as it measures how authoritative a website’s content is and search engines use that information to determine rankings. So, what’s the importance of domain authority for law firms?

Search Ranking Factors

To understand how domain authority works, it’s helpful to put it into the larger context of SEO. When you search for something on Google or Bing, you get a list of results – but how are those results determined? To put it simply, search ranking factors are what decide why a particular website ranks well (or not) for particular words or phrases. Those factors are: 

Relevance 

This factor has to do with the web page itself. What content is on it? What are the words, phrases, images, video, and keywords present? This measurement looks at the page in totality and determines the quality of that content. 

Authority

This factor is why a link-building strategy is important for SEO. Does the site have incoming links at all? If it does, are they from trusted and credible sites? Have those websites referred back to the law firm website, and have those links been cited? 

Link Quality

Links to credible websites boost the value of your own web content. Taken together, it’s the quantity and quality of links to the law firm’s website that have a lot to do with how well the firm will rank in search. 

Page Rank

Google no longer publicly displays the page rank in numeric order, but it’s still looked at by search engines (even if you can’t see it). If sites don’t rank well, it’s normally because the content isn’t great, or the site doesn’t have authority. 

In general, the two most important factors dealt with are on-page SEO (relevance), and off-page SEO (authority). 

Where Does Domain Authority Come Into Play?

Once Google did away with external Page Rank, domain authority became a more important metric. Domain authority for law firms is essentially a measurement that shows whether their website is trusted among other websites based on the links to them. How “trusted” a site is related to link quality (mentioned above). Not all links are created equal. For example, the value placed on a link to a law firm’s site from another site is on an exponential curve. Simply put, some links are worth more than others. 

If you understand domain authority for law firms, you have insight into two things: the ranking potential of pages on that domain and the value of a link from another site. Those are key pieces of information that law firms can use to develop a link-building strategy that helps them rank higher. There are a variety of tools you can use to get to this information. You could look at options like SEMrush’s Authority Score, Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, and MOZ’s Domain Authority. Your link-building strategy should include getting links from sites with the highest domain authority. 

Takeaway:

If that sounds a little complicated, don’t get intimidated. At the end of the day, domain authority for law firms is an important thing to determine, as it acts as a signal to search engines that your site is trusted and will provide valuable information to searchers. Need help with your SEO strategy? Contact us today for help with creating a successful SEO strategy.