How Can Referring Domains Improve Your SEO Ranking?
Do you wish to maintain the high search engine rankings and build online authority? Referring domain is the term to put your interest on. It is crucial to understand the value of referring domains because their quantity and quality can make a great difference in your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
You ask how? Here’s your answer.
Providing 100s of backlinks from only one website will never be a better option than using the backlinks from different referring domains. This is so because the links aren’t measured with equal weight. You must acquire a sizable number of unique links from unique referring domains to attract unique website visitors, bring more traffic sources, and enhance page views.
This piece will let you know the importance of quantity and quality referring domains and how you can leverage this concept to enhance your digital presence and establish your brand credibility.
Let’s first understand what Referring Domain is.
What is a Referring Domain?
Referring domains or linking domains are the external websites that direct visitors to your website. These domains contain backlinks that drive views and traffic to your particular web pages. Below provided is an image for your reference.
You can find two referring domains with various backlinks linked to a single site in the above image. This depicts how external websites drive referral traffic to your website. Your website may acquire many referral domains, and those domains may consist of various backlinks pointing to your specific web page. Even your website can also be considered a referring domain if it has links that lead visitors to external sites.
For example, an external website, let’s say X, can be considered as a referring domain if it has some backlinks referring to your website, let’s say Y. Regardless if you are receiving multiple backlinks from Site X, it is still considered as one referring domain for your website Y.
Moving on, if there are ten different websites linked to your page, then they are considered as ten different referring domains. Some sites are linked to your page for the only purpose of adding a reference to their content.
Note: One cannot control the number of backlinks per referring domain.
People often cannot figure out the difference between backlinks and referring domains as they are similar SEO ranking factors. If you are mistaken between the two terms, then we will clear the air in our further paragraphs.
Let’s discuss further.
Difference between External Backlinks & Referring Domains
Backlinks
Backlinks are linked to a page on an external website. They are incoming links from a referring domain to another website. These links are usually embedded in videos, buttons, images, texts, or other page elements. One can evaluate backlinks based on domain authority (DA), relevance, link location, site diversity, and other factors.
Referring Domains
Referring domains are websites consist of one or more backlinks that drive traffic to another website. In some cases, you may receive multiple backlinks from the same domain. On the other hand, you may even have multiple referring domains linking back to your particular web page.
If we question how many backlinks can a referring domain have? The answer is hundreds or even thousands of backlinks that can direct to your website. Having many backlinks from a single referring domain is possible; however, it can be considered a black-hat link building strategy or negative SEO practice. To overcome this situation, it is better to analyze your backlink profiles and avoid getting penalized by Google.
How can you check referring domains and backlinks?
As now, you are clear about the difference between the two terms – referring domains and backlinks. It’s time to help you know how to check each SEO metric using Ahrefs dashboard.
Three simple steps to check referring domains:
Step 1: Go to Site explore
Step 2: Enter your domain name
Step 3: Click on referring domains
In the above example, you can see the top referring domains of nerdwallet.com blog are:
- adobe.com
- forbes.com, etc.
This means the above websites have the highest domain rating among the top referring domains in the database. DR shows the strength of a domain’s backlink profile on a 100-point scale, where 100 is the strongest.
If you wish to check the backlinks, you can choose the Backlink option from the list.
What is the importance of referring domains in SEO?
Referring domains or linking domains are traffic sources that send signals to search engines and online users of your web pages’ credibility and quality. It is a known fact that Google has a check on several factors to access backlinks’ quality. These include the context of your placement, relevance and source quality, linking domain, and the page where the backlink is posted.
To acquire more organic traffic, it is crucial to include backlinks from top referring domains. According to a study by Ahrefs, it was shown that approx. 90.63% of pages without any referring domains do not attract organic search traffic from Google. By not linking your targeted web pages to high-quality referring domains, you are losing more potential traffic, sales, and engagement.
Can we consider referring domains as SEO ranking factors?
Are you, too, are looking out for the answer to the above question? The answer is YES. Referring domains are SEO ranking factors. These are considered high-impact ranking factors that can make a great difference in your search optimization efforts. Each referring domain is counted as a vote of confidence by Google. Hence, it is clear that having a plethora of different websites linked to your website pages gives your website a plus point.
But this doesn’t mean that you should acquire links from any referring domain. Your goal should be to obtain links from top referring domains that are:
- Relevant to your niche market
- Authoritative
- High-quality
- Trustworthy
Now the question arises, how to acquire high-quality referring domains? It all starts with your link-building and content marketing strategies.
How to get more referring domains?
If done correctly, link building with a referring domain strategy can deliver valuable SEO results. Here are the tips to get more referring domains.
- Analyzing referring domains report
By analyzing the referring domain report, you get a complete list of every domain linked to your queried website. You can export the file, evaluate your referring domains’ quantity and quality, and determine which has the strongest backlink profile. If you get more domains with a high-authority score, it’s good news. Analyzing the reports will help you in identifying more chances for link building.
- Identify your top-performing pages
By identifying your top-performing pages, you get the opportunity to plan your next link building campaign and content marketing strategy. Your top-performing pages are the ones that receive the highest number of backlinks. This means that your content is trusted among other online users and websites.
Hence to boost your SEO strategy and link building efforts, it would be better to create high-quality content and blogs that cover related topics to those high performing pages.
- Enhance your audience targeting methods
To rule the world of SEO, knowing your potential customers is the very first step. It is important to understand your target audience’s demands, online behavior, and information needs to create a roadmap for your search optimization campaigns and link building. Else, you will be wasting your precious time writing content and building irrelevant links that will drive no positive results.
To ensure a better start, conduct audience analysis and market research to determine your potential customers’ needs, interests, expectations, and demographics. This step will help you in targeting the right keywords and narrow downing your link-building scope.
- Creating quality content
Another best way to drive more traffic to your website is to create and post valuable content on your website. The more quality content on your website, the more links you are likely to get from top referring domains in your industry. With the right content marketing strategy, one can broaden their target audience and referral links, build trust and online authority, and boost conversions from organic search results. To help you in improving your content marketing strategy and acquire more backlinks from referring domains, we have listed down a few tips to follow:
- Publishing expert roundup posts is one of the most cost-effective ways to earn links from bloggers and industry specialists.
- Try to leverage the niche expertise of your team. Tap into their knowledge of industry topics that you want to insert in your content and include direct quotes to boost your content’s authority.
- Publishing case studies are another unique, data-driven content that can help you earn links from industry publications.
- Create high-quality infographics that consist of actionable takeaways to obtain a greater number of backlinks from top-tier bloggers and publishers.
Some of the other types of content you can try to explore are expert interviews, local press releases, eBooks, and whitepapers. Always remember to build your unique brand that reflects on your content.
- Invest in the right tools
With the advancement in technology, you get a lot many tools that can ease your task. Hence, it is crucial to scale your link building campaigns with the right tools. Reach out to such tools that can let you find highly relevant websites to pitch your content.
- Review your competitors
To start a successful domain, you need first to identify your competitor’s domains. The Ahrefs dashboard can show you a good number of unique keywords used by your competitors, keywords used by your domain, and an intersection graph. The data will be fruitful for your brand presence, and you can easily start building your website’s strategy.
By assessing our competitors’ approach, you can determine the quality and number of their referring domains. Never avoid analyzing their backlink profile and figuring out how they manage to get high rankings and more links in their search results. This will definitely help in improving your link building strategy.
- Choosing ideal destination pages
It is important to determine what are the other sites that would drive potential growth to your site, benefit from your content, and which websites you wish to see your links on.
The concept of link building is not only about publishing guest posts with various links. It is also about choosing top referring domains and establishing real, meaningful connections. Look after the website content on priority, what topics your competitors are writing on, their online reputation, website structure, etc.
Wrapping up
Increasing the number of unique referring domains and growing your brand authority is not a difficult task. You only have to be specific about what you want from your campaigns and keep an eye on your competitors’ activities. This will help you in getting the idea about what can work for your brand.
Our team of experts at Best1Tech focuses on creating a unique 1:1 link building strategy on unique referring domains. We develop a quality website and even have a careful look at the website we work with to ensure that you maximize your backlink strategy.
We work in collaboration with our SEO team to strategically build a strong backlink profile of our clients.
Contact us now to help you develop an impressive digital profile using the appropriate link building strategies that resemble your goals.