How to Enhance Your Website’s Authority to Succeed in Google’s Searches

When it comes to ranking content in its search engine, Google does not only focus on the proper use of keywords and links; it also rewards pages that prove to be a trustworthy and relevant resource. That is precisely what we are going to discuss today: your website’s authority and how to enhance it to become more competitive in search results.

Authority is a fundamental pillar of Google’s EEAT concept (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which measures the quality of content and its creator. In essence, being an authority means that your brand, your website, or even your personal authorship is recognized and respected within a specific niche. If you succeed in having your website regarded as a reliable source of information, you will not only improve your ranking but also build a strong and lasting brand.

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Authority Score: a Metric for Measuring Authority

But how is authority measured? This is where SEO tools come into play. Semrush, for example, has its own metric, the Authority Score, which allows you to quantify your domain’s strength on a scale from 1 to 100.

This is not merely an abstract number, but rather it is calculated based on three key factors:

• Backlink signals: the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website from other domains.
• Organic traffic: the estimated monthly visits your website receives from search engines.
• Spam factors: the presence of manipulation indicators or suspicious patterns (such as unnatural growth in links or too many links from the same IP address). These factors negatively impact your website’s rating.

In practice, a high Authority Score indicates that your website has a robust link profile and that Google considers it relevant. However, the true value of your score will also depend on the segment in which you compete and on your specific competitors. This means that if your website has an Authority Score of 30 while other similar sites you compete against have an average of 20, your score is actually quite favorable, even if it may not seem so at first glance.

How to Find Out Your Authority Score in Semrush

To get started, you only need to log in to Semrush and go to the “Domain Overview” section under “SEO”; one of the first figures you will find on the dashboard is the “Authority Score.” Another option is to use the free tool Website Authority Checker directly.

These panels will provide you with valuable information about key indicators such as: the number of backlinks, the number of referring domains that have at least one link pointing to the analyzed domain/URL, the number of monthly visits, organic traffic estimates, toxicity score, the trend of your Authority Score over the last 12 months, and more. In addition, if you would like to see the results of your competitors, you only need to repeat the same steps with their websites and compare the data.

How to Improve Your Authority Score

Once you have analyzed your score and your competitors’, it is time to take action to maintain a good score or, if you do not yet have it, to strive for improvement. To that end, Semrush recommends the following:

Obtain high-quality links: Seek out and build backlinks from websites that are both relevant and trustworthy within your industry. A link from a reputable site is far more valuable for your authority.

• Obtain high-quality links: seek out and build backlinks from websites that are both relevant and trustworthy within your industry. A link from a reputable site is far more valuable for your authority.
• Create high-quality content: apply SEO on-page best practices to achieve better rankings and gain more traffic from search engines.
• Monitor your backlink profile regularly: conduct periodic reviews and, if you find many unreliable or low-quality links, contact the websites that are linking to you to request their removal.
• Distribute authority through internal links: use internal linking to spread authority across the various pages of your website. This helps Google understand your site’s structure and strengthens the relevance of your content.

Of course, we would like to remind you that SEO is a complex recipe composed of many ingredients, so you must ensure quality is present in each of them. While a high Authority Score can help your rankings, on its own it is not an absolute guarantee of success in search results.

Building Authority for Generative Search Engines

Improving your Authority Score is not only a strategy for traditional SEO, but it also prepares you for the future of search. Indeed, we are referring to generative search engines—those new systems that feed on website content to generate their responses.

Authority is a foundational element of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), the practice of optimizing website content so that generative search engines will cite it in their answers, according to research from Princeton University.

Furthermore, a study by the platform Rankscale.ai analyzed nearly 8,000 citations in 57 different queries performed in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini to determine which factors influence whether these AIs choose to rank a piece of content. Authority was one of the common factors, making it clear that building authority, trust, and credibility on your website will increase your chances of being cited by generative search engines.

In summary, authority is the currency of SEO today and for the future. It is how Google and other search engines recognize experts in every field. To audit your competitors’ backlink profiles, search for new link-building opportunities, and of course improve your Authority Score, it is advisable to rely on SEO analysis and optimization tools such as Semrush.

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Photo: Flux Schnell