What Is Website Authority and Digital Trust, and Why Does It Matter?

Without the right authority signals, your business will struggle to gain user trust. Further, your site isn’t likely to break into the top Google search results, hampering your growth.

If potential customers cannot find you and they don’t feel that you’re trustworthy, transparent, and provide a great customer experience, they’re not going to do business with you – they’ll contact your competitors.

In this blog, we’ll guide you on the importance of website authority and digital trust, as well as how to build them to get a good SERP position.

For more than 16 years now, our team at SGD has been providing our clients with a range of digital marketing solutions that help them stand out from the crowd. From web design and ongoing maintenance to search engine optimisation (SEO) and digital marketing, we’ve got you covered. If you’re looking for a reliable, long-term web design partner, contact us to get started.

What is Website Authority?

Created by leading SEO software company, Moz, website authority (sometimes also referred to as domain authority) is a ranking metric that assigns websites a score between one and 100 based on their relevance to their industry or a specific topic.

In other words, it’s used to predict how well a website will rank on search engines. Websites with a high score have a better chance of performing well in search engine result pages (SERPs) and, therefore, getting more organic traffic.

So, what is a good website authority?

A score of between 95 and 100 is truly impressive and has generally only been achieved by businesses like Wikipedia, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

At the other end of the spectrum, a score below 15 is considered very low and will really affect your website’s ability to rank well.

While there is almost always room for improvement, a score between 30 and 50 is generally considered good. This, of course, completely depends on what your competitor’s authority is.

If you’re trying to rank in Google for a particular keyword, even if you have the best content, you’re going to find it very difficult to claim the top position if your authority is significantly lower than your competitor’s.

What About Page Authority – Is It the Same Thing?

While page authority is also an important metric for your success in the online realm, it’s not the same as website authority.

The key difference between the two is what is being measured – while website authority predicts the overall performance of a website as a whole, page authority predicts the performance of a specific web page.

The truth is that search engines rank web pages, not websites. So the authority of a specific page is often much more important than the authority of the domain.

Both domain authority and page authority are important for ensuring that you rank well in SERPs.

Why is Website Authority Important?

Website authority is important for a number of reasons:

• It helps us understand how Google, and other search engines, work (as they want to ensure a great user experience and so will look for topic relevance and content value).
• It helps us to rank for more competitive keywords (which is notoriously difficult due to the sheer number of websites trying to target the same keywords).
• It’s key to understanding why certain websites rank higher than others (as they have established themselves as an authority in their niche so search engines prioritise them).
• Websites with a higher website authority perform better than those with a lower authority (studies have shown that the top three results get most of the traffic).

How to Improve Website Authority

Follow our tips to improve your website authority and build digital trust, increasing your chances of ranking higher on SERPs.

Remember that this is a long-term process

Improving your website authority isn’t going to happen overnight. It’ll take time for crawlers to evaluate your site after making changes, so give it some time and be patient. Trust and authority are earned through providing ongoing value.

Ensure your page is set up correctly

The structure and user-friendliness of your page contribute to its overall score; without proper structure, search engines find it difficult to crawl your web pages, index them, and know which pages to prioritise.

Improve your page load speed

Page speed is another thing that search engines take into account when ranking websites. Users will bounce (leave) your website if it takes too long to load, and these sorts of issues are noted as poor user experience and your rankings can be impacted.

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly or responsive

These days, most organic searches come from mobile devices (like smartphones and tablets), and search engines prioritise mobile-friendly websites to ensure everyone has a good experience.

Implement on-page and off-page SEO

Optimise your titles and page descriptions, your images and other media, and use keywords naturally in your content. As for off-page SEO, creating informative content that is worth linking to, as well as keeping your Google Business page optimised will provide trust signals to the search engines.

Perform regular link audits

While inbound links are important for website authority, the websites linking to your content must be natural and of good quality. Regularly audit your links and remove unsavoury ones.

Earn high-quality backlinks

Backlinks are important for ranking, and yet a large number of websites have a severe lack of them. Earn backlinks by giving testimonials, guest blogging, and listing yourself in directories.

While gaining the trust of search engines is important in maintaining a good SERP ranking, it is not the only factor at play – potential customers need to trust you, too. Enter digital trust.

What is Digital Trust?

Digital trust refers to a potential customer’s confidence in an online system or platform to protect their data, provide a secure space for interactions, and uphold certain ethical standards.

Think about it this way – every time you seek a service, you’re trusting that business with your personal information (including your full name, credit card number, and address).

If a data breach were to occur and that information was obtained by someone else, would you trust that business again?

Why is Digital Trust Important?

Digital trust is important for a number of reasons:

• It helps you to better manage your business’s online reputation (as having a positive reputation amongst customers helps to improve your profitability).
• It encourages customer loyalty (as your customers are more likely to seek your services going forward if they feel safe sharing their personal data with you).
• It helps you gain a competitive edge (as you are more likely to grow than businesses that do not put much emphasis on the security and privacy of customer data).
• It helps you to establish stronger partnerships with other businesses, which increases the chances you’ll be sought after for collaborations and alliances down the line.

How to Build Digital Trust

Here are a few key steps that can help your business on the path to building digital trust:

Encourage customers to leave reviews

People are often wary of the legitimacy of reviews, but it’s harder to fake them across multiple platforms (from written and even video on your website to Google, Facebook, and third-party directories).

Adopt innovative authentication methods

These include biometrics (such as fingerprint scans or facial recognition) and two-factor authentication to help users verify their identities and provide an extra layer of security.

Encrypt all data that is sent over the internet

This helps protect user data by ensuring that even if someone were to somehow obtain access to it, they would be unable to read it without all the encryption keys.

Create a strong privacy policy

This should outline how customer data is collected, stored, and shared with third parties (and why), and it should be made transparent to customers upfront.

Have procedures to handle data breaches

Even if you take appropriate security measures, it’s important to have a clear plan for how to respond in the case of an incident (including communication protocols and processes for data recovery).

Utilise cybersecurity software tools

Various tools on the market can help you to avoid cyberattacks, unauthorised data access, and identity theft. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so do your research.

Maintain a multi-layered approach to security

There are many points where cyber criminals aim to exploit weaknesses. A multi-layered approach to security offers protection at your domain, DNS, web server, and application levels, reducing the surface area of potential attacks.

Improving Website Authority and Building Digital Trust with SGD

It takes time to build digital trust and website authority, so you need to ensure that you’re doing it right from the beginning.

By being patient and implementing as many of the above tips and strategies as possible, you’ll see both your website authority and digital trust improve.

Some of these strategies require expert implementation, so you’d be wise to work with an experienced digital agency to ensure proper execution and success.

Our team at SGD is here to help. We can perform an audit of your website and provide recommendations that will work to improve your ranking in SERPs and generate more organic traffic.

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