Do you want to increase the domain rating of your website and rank higher on search engines? If yes, then… Stay with us!
DR is a metric developed by Ahrefs that measures the strength of your website’s backlink profile. It ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more authoritative and trustworthy websites.
Why is DR important for SEO? Because it reflects how well your website is linked to other relevant and high-quality websites in your niche. This signals to search engines that your website is valuable and deserves to rank higher for your target keywords.
But how do you increase DR of your website in 2024? Well, we have a solution that really works and works really quickly.
We are Content Whale, one of the top 3 full-service content-writing companies in India. For a very long time, we had a DR of 26, which was decent but not enough to stand out from our competitors.
We wanted to increase our DR because an article from Ahrefs suggests that DR helps with website crawl and higher traffic. Obviously, we wanted to do all this without compromising on the quality of our content and services.
We knew that we had to implement some effective off-page SEO strategies to achieve our goal. And we did it! We increased our DR by 15 in just 30 days, i.e., from 26 to 41, thanks to our dedicated team and some smart tactics that I learned with experience. (Stay tuned to find out AI’s role in this journey.)
In this blog, we will share with you how we did it and what you can learn from our experience. Whether you are a startup or a small business, you can apply these strategies to increase DR of your website and get ahead of your competition.
Understanding the Basics of Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO involves building relationships with other websites and platforms that can link back to your website, or mention your brand.
The main purpose of off-page SEO is to increase your website’s authority, relevance, and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines.
There are many ways to do off-page SEO, but the most common and effective ones are:
- Backlinking: The more backlinks you have from high-DR websites, the higher your DR will be. Note that it has to be a do-follow backlink.
- Press Releases: Press releases can help you generate buzz and awareness for your brand, as well as get backlinks from reputable sources. Press releases should also have do-follow links in order to provide link juice and increase DR of your website.
- Content Syndication: This is the process of republishing your existing content on other platforms, such as Medium, LinkedIn, etc. According to what I have seen, it’s not that impactful, but it helps in totality.
Now, let’s see how we strategize these techniques to increase DR of our website.
How Featured.com Helped Us Increase DR of Our Website?
One of the main strategies that we used to increase our DR was backlinking. We wanted to get as many ‘DO-FOLLOW’ backlinks as possible from high-DR websites in our niche, such as content marketing, digital marketing, and SEO. For this, in our previous efforts, we were using a free version of featured.com.
What is featured.com?
Featured.com is a platform that connects journalists and bloggers with niche experts for any insights and information they are looking for.
On featured.com, you have the liberty to browse through hundreds of questions and answer those that are relevant to your niche and provide valuable insights. If the journalist or bloggers likes your answer, they will feature it in their article and link back to your website.
So, this time around, we bought its subscription for around $99 USD. Even though, we had limited writers assigned to this task, we still got dozens of backlinks from Featured.com, and they were very impactful.
I mean, obviously, this is expected from the writers of a top content writing company. Isn’t it? Anyway, this helped us increase DR of our website by 15 in just 25 to 30 days.
How to Increase DR of a Website Using Press Releases and Media Outreach?
Simultaneously, another strategy that we were working on to increase DR of our website was press releases and media outreach. We wanted to get more exposure and recognition for our brand, as well as get backlinks from high-DR media outlets.
We reached out to media houses like Livemint, Newsbreak, Outlook India, Deccan Herald, and many more. Obviously, we didn’t want to spend too much on this, according to what the same Ahrefs article suggests. Hence, we didn’t reach out to the ‘too-big’ media outlets.
We also made sure that those guest posts on media websites had do-follow links to our website, which means that they passed on the link juice to our website and boosted our DR.
We got sufficient results from our press release and media outreach strategy. It successfully helped us increase DR of our website significantly.
The Power of Content Platforms – Medium and LinkedIn
Finally, with content writing and syndication, we passively helped increase DR of our website by massively using platforms like Medium and LinkedIn. We wanted to use these platforms to share our content, showcase our expertise, and drive more traffic to our website.
We created original content for Medium and LinkedIn, such as blog posts, articles, guides, etc. We made sure that our content was informative, engaging, and relevant to our niche. We also made sure that our content had links to our website, which helped us drive more traffic and backlinks to our website.
We syndicated existing content from our website to Medium and LinkedIn, which means that we republished and also repurposed our content on these platforms. We made sure that our content had canonical tags, which means that we told search engines that the original source of the content was our website and avoided duplicate content issues.
Although there is no direct tool or way to find how much it helped but the traffic growth, organic click-through rates, and reduced bounce rates indicate that it worked. Plus, it helped us increase our brand awareness and credibility.
Measuring Success – From DR 26 to 41
We started implementing these strategies a month ago, and we were eager to see the results. We used Ahrefs to track our DR and other metrics, such as organic traffic, referring domains, and keywords.
We were thrilled to see that our DR had increased from 26 to 41 in just 30 days. That’s a 60% increase in our website’s authority and trustworthiness. We also saw improvements in our other metrics, such as:
- Our organic traffic increased by 23%.
- Our referring domains increased by 20% as we didn’t spend so much but wisely.
- Our keywords ranking increased by 21%.
I mean, I knew this would happen as I have done this before for other clients in the recent past. So, what does all this translate to:
Obviously – increased DR of Content Whale’s website. Yeah, so what?
- So, now we have 2x brand visibility in terms of impressions for branded keywords.
- So, we have a 2x increase in MQLs due to our focus on bottom-of-the-funnel and conversion-oriented keywords
- We are now officially the top 3 content writing companies in India. Click it, check it out!
- And finally, we are off to expand into the market overseas.
Key Takeaways for CEOs and Marketing Managers
All of these achievements, just in a month. We hope that you found our blog useful and informative. We want to share with you some key takeaways that you can apply to your own website and business.
- Off-page SEO is really essential for you.
- Backlinking, press releases with ‘Do-Follow’ links, and content syndication are the primary strategies for off-page SEO.
- Keep measuring your performance through various tools. Mainly, focus on keywords that you are ranking for, CTR, and traffic.
- Stay consistent. Don’t let your patience wear off, or maybe just hire us, and we’ll help you.
AI’s role in the Increased DR of Our Website
I don’t know exactly how much, but we created a lot of content. It wasn’t humanly possible to create such a huge amount of content in such a short period of time with a limited number of people working on it. So, what did we do?
We took AI’s assistance in research, outlining, content creation, and, finally SEO optimization as well. That’s a lot for AI to handle for the current state that any Chatbot is, let it be ChatGPT 4.0 or BingAI (Let’s not talk about Bard).
Our team is pretty specialized in writing SEO-optimized AI-driven blogs that rank. Check them out here if you wish to.
However, for answers on featured.com or HARO, for short copies and short blogs as well, we used AI to get a basic write-up and then personalized and optimized it for readability and user-friendliness. This increased our productivity by 4x while still being able to produce quality, engagement-worthy content.
And guess what?
It all worked out! Our featured.com answers were published, our blogs ranked, and our LinkedIn posts got more likes than ever before.
Conclusion
We are proud of our achievement and grateful to our team for such a commendable job. An increased domain rating of a website is a sign of trust for consumers as well as search engines. The benefits are endless, and efforts are continuous.
An improved SEO performance has helped thousands of businesses to get out of a competitive space and grow exponentially.
Trust me, On-Page SEO can only do so much. Off-Page SEO if done right, can show you exceptional results helping you with so many types of ‘numbers’.
We encourage you to try these strategies for your website and if you need any assistance – Maybe writing featured.com answers that’ll definitely get published or blogs that’ll surely rank, DO NOT hesitate to reach out.
We wish you all the best for now and for your future!
FAQs
How do I increase my domain rating?
Try to get as many high-quality do-follow backlinks from high-authority websites as possible. Also, keep updating your content to valuable and informative for users.
What influences domain rating?
In simple words, there is only a number of backlinks that influence your domain ratings. You can either get thousands of low-quality backlinks from low-DR websites or a few high-quality backlinks from very high-DR websites.
Bad domain ratings translates to a backlink profile with less number of backlinks from other websites. In order to increase your domain ratings, you can try guest postings, answering on featured.com, etc.
