What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a third-party metric, not something Google officially uses or publishes. It was created by Moz as a way to estimate relative site strength based primarily on the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to a domain.

Scores range from 0–100, with higher being stronger. New sites typically start at 0–10. Well-established small business sites might reach 20–40 over several years. Major media sites like Wikipedia or the New York Times score 90+.

The primary use of domain authority is competitive analysis: if you want to rank for a keyword and the top-ranking sites have DA scores of 50+, you will need a much stronger backlink profile (or significantly better content and on-page SEO) to displace them. If top-ranking sites have DA scores of 15–25, the keyword is much more attainable.

For local SEO specifically, domain authority matters less than it does for broad competitive keywords. A local plumber in Tulsa does not need to outrank a national directory on domain authority, they need better local relevance signals, a complete Google Business Profile, and locally-relevant content. A lower-DA site can outrank a higher-DA site for local queries by being genuinely more relevant to the local search.

Similar metrics exist from other SEO tools: Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR), SEMrush uses Authority Score. These all measure similar concepts (backlink profile strength) but use different calculation methods, so they produce different numbers for the same domain. None are interchangeable.

The practical takeaway: domain authority is useful for competitive research and trend-tracking (has your site's backlink profile been growing or stagnating?), but it is not a direct measure of rankings and should not be optimized for its own sake.

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