What Is Domain Authority & Why Is It Important For My Recruitment Website?

It’s a little wishy washy how important domain authority is when we're contemplating the SEO effectiveness of your recruitment website. However the highest ranking websites tend to have good domain authority scores and thousands of backlinks leading to their websites. Google doesn’t strictly use the score as a determining factor when it comes to ranking your recruitment site but Google is a big fan of backlinks (& content) and backlinks make up a strong foundation of your domain score. 

What is a domain authority score?

Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz, which predicts how likely it is, that your website will be ranked highly on search engines. It is based on a machine learning algorithm that closely correlates around 40 data points against where a website ranks on the search engines. The domain your recruitment website sits on is given a score of 0 - 100. It is calculated by using a combination of the number of backlinks your recruitment websites has and across how many websites those backlinks are spread across. Your score won’t stay static and will often fluctuate by a few points and hopefully increase over time. 

What is page authority? 

Page authority (PA) scores an individual page on your agency website. Scores are likely to fluctuate between pages, for example maybe you wrote an amazing blog post once on a question candidates tend to search for and lots of websites found this article useful and backlinked to this page. Now this page would have a very high score. Especially when compared to say your privacy policy page, which no one really visits and receives no backlinks. 

How to measure my domain authority score? 

There are several free to use websites, which can help you to measure the domain authority of your recruitment agency site. You can use the original Moz LInk Explorer or Ahrefs’ tool plus several others out there. 

Why is my domain authority score so low?

Before we get into it, I would strongly recommend drawing up a list of your 10 closest competitor agencies. The recruitment agencies who always seem to be on the same PSLs as you or those who always have a candidate in the mix for the roles you work on. Compare your score to their scores. There’s no point comparing your score to a well established consumer website like TripAdvisor, Men’s Fitness or Time Out. Your scores are only low if you’re on the lower end of the scale when compared to your competitors and your score should be taken in context to your competitors. For context and a concrete answer the average score for a website is 40-50. A good domain authority score is anything over 50. 

Having said all of this, there are a few reasons why your score might be low…

Your domain and recruitment agency is new and when I say new I would say less than 3 years old, which is a large portion of recruitment agencies. If it’s brand new then it may take some time for search engines such as Google to crawl and index all of the pages on your recruitment site. You can speed up this process by adding your sitemap.xml to Google Search Console or manually add each page if you would prefer. 

Google really likes websites that have lots of natural and relevant backlinks that have been gathered over a prolonged period. Domain authority is largely based on the number and quality and relevant backlinks pointing to your agency site. If your recruitment site has few, irrelevant, spammy or low-quality backlinks, your domain authority will likely be low.

Like all websites, recruitment sites need to be constantly maintained by developers, SEO consultants and writers. Technical issues like broken links, crawl errors, and duplicate content can negatively impact your website's search engine performance and domain authority. Duplicate content does include job adverts so try to ensure the adverts you post to your own recruitment site are unique. 

Poor on-page SEO can affect your recruitment website's visibility in search engine results and the domain authority. Look through the copy on your website and try to pepper it with keywords relevant to the page, without sacrificing readability. 

What factors contribute to my recruitment website’s domain authority score?

There are around 40 factors that contribute to your domain authority score but backlinks are the biggest contributing factor. Not just any old backlinks, they have to be quality and relevant backlinks from authoritative and non-spammy websites. I’d focus on quality but you’re also going to need big numbers. Some of my competitors have anywhere from 1,000 - 100,000 backlinks and those will be spread across several hundred websites. 

How do I improve the domain score and page score for my recruitment website?

Essentially, by focusing on and improving both your on-page SEO and off-page SEO, your domain authority score and page authority score should increase quite naturally. Focus on creating high quality content for your candidates & clients that they’ll hopefully share and other relevant sites will pick up on and feature. Also ensure your website is fast, mobile. friendly and has a great user experience. Google often rolls out updates to its algorithms and these updates can change your score but it shouldn’t be a huge change. You can focus on gathering backlinks for your agency site but this should be done by a professional ideally otherwise you could end up penalising your website. If you undertake this yourself then focus on relevant websites but that's a whole 'nother blog post right there!

And get in touch with us if you have any questions. We work with two amazing senior SEO consultants who I'm sure can help you.