If you’ve ever talked to an SEO person for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard the term “domain authority” thrown around like it’s the whole ballgame. And if you looked it up, you may have walked away more confused than when you started. So let’s talk about what is domain authority, what it actually measures, where it comes from, and most importantly, whether a roofing company, plumbing outfit, or HVAC contractor in a mid-sized market should spend any energy worrying about it. The short answer might surprise you.
Where Domain Authority Comes From
Domain Authority, usually shortened to DA, is a score developed by a company called Moz. It runs on a scale from 1 to 100 and is meant to predict how likely a website is to rank well in search engines. Higher scores suggest more authority. Lower scores suggest the opposite. Sounds clean. Sounds useful. The catch is that Moz made it up.
That’s not a knock on Moz. They’re a legitimate SEO research company and they’ve built a useful metric. But DA is not a Google metric. Google does not use domain authority to rank your website. Google has never acknowledged it as a ranking factor. It doesn’t appear in Google Search Console. It doesn’t come up in any of Google’s official documentation for webmasters. When someone tells you that you need to “improve your domain authority to rank higher on Google,” they are technically describing a correlation, not a mechanism.
Other tools have their own versions. Ahrefs calls theirs Domain Rating. Semrush has Authority Score. They’re all measuring roughly the same thing using different formulas, which tells you something about how fuzzy this category of metric actually is.
What all of them are mostly measuring is the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your site. A backlink is just another website linking to yours. The thinking goes: if a lot of respected websites link to you, search engines probably trust you more. That part is true. Backlinks are a real ranking signal. But DA is a proxy for that signal, not the signal itself.
What Is Domain Authority Actually Telling You
Think of DA less as a score and more as a relative snapshot. A brand new website might have a DA of 1. A massive publication like Forbes sits around 90-plus. A solid local contractor site that’s been around for ten years, has some local press mentions, maybe a link from the BBB and the chamber of commerce, might land somewhere between 20 and 40. That’s not embarrassing. For most local service businesses, that range is fine.
The number matters most when you’re comparing your site to competitors in your specific market. If you’re a plumber in Duluth and your nearest competitor has a DA of 28 while yours is 15, that gap might be worth paying attention to, not because 28 is objectively impressive, but because you’re behind the sites you’re actually competing against. Context is everything here.
Moz’s research has shown that DA does correlate with search rankings at a broad level. Sites with higher DA scores tend to rank for more keywords and appear higher in results. But correlation isn’t control. You can’t simply raise your DA score and expect your rankings to follow. It doesn’t work that way. DA is a lagging indicator, not a lever.
The Backlink Thing Is Real, Even If DA Isn’t the Perfect Measure
Even if DA as a number is imprecise, the underlying concept it’s trying to capture is legitimate. Google has said for years that links from other websites function like votes of confidence. Their original PageRank algorithm was built almost entirely on this idea. The web as a network of trust, where pages with more credible endorsements rise to the top.
What that means practically for a contractor is this: if no other websites on the internet link to yours, you are starting from a disadvantage. Not a catastrophic one. Not an insurmountable one. But a real one. A competitor who has been mentioned in a local news story, who got linked from a neighborhood association website, who shows up on a homebuilder’s vendor list, those links add up over time. Each one is a small signal that your site is real, that people reference it, that it exists in a web of credible local sources.
A 2020 analysis by Backlinko looked at over 11 million Google search results and found that the number of domains linking to a page was the single factor most correlated with first-page rankings. Not the number of total backlinks, but the number of unique referring domains. So ten links from ten different websites will generally do more for you than ten links from the same website. That finding lines up with how most SEOs think about this. Breadth of sources matters more than volume from one source.
For a local contractor, that’s actually good news. You don’t need links from national publications. You need links from local sources: the city business directory, your suppliers, your trade associations, maybe a local chamber page, a sponsorship mention on a youth sports league site. These are not glamorous. They’re also not that hard to get if you’re paying attention.
Why Contractors Get Confused About This
Part of the problem is that DA is very easy to report on. Marketing agencies love metrics that fit neatly in a monthly report. “Your DA went from 18 to 22 this quarter” sounds like progress. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it means very little about whether you’re actually getting more calls from people searching “AC repair near me.”
A lot of contractors end up chasing DA improvements without connecting the work to actual business outcomes. They pay for link-building services of questionable quality, watch their score tick upward, and still don’t show up in the searches that matter. It’s worth asking any agency you work with how they connect backlink work to ranking improvements and then to actual leads. If that chain of logic is vague, that’s a problem.
There’s also a version of this where contractors ignore DA entirely because someone told them it doesn’t matter. That’s also not quite right. It’s a useful signal when used appropriately. The mistake is treating it as the goal rather than as one of several diagnostic tools.
What Actually Moves the Needle for Local Contractors
If you’re a contractor trying to rank in your local market, here’s what we’ve seen matter most, in no particular order because ranking is never as linear as a ranked list would imply.
Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than most contractors realize. Reviews, photos, service categories, responses to questions, all of it feeds into how Google surfaces you in local results. If you haven’t put real effort into Google Business Profile optimization, that is the first place to start. Not DA. Not backlinks. That.
On-page SEO is another place where the basics still produce big results when done right. The pages of your website need to be clear about what you do and where you do it. Not in a keyword-stuffing way, but in a way that matches how real people search. There’s a whole checklist of things that belong on every service page, and most contractor sites are missing several of them. On-page SEO for contractor websites is less exciting than talking about domain authority, but it converts at a much higher rate.
Reviews matter more than most people expect. Not just for conversion, but as a local ranking signal. BrightLocal’s research consistently shows that review quantity and recency are among the factors that influence local pack rankings. If you’ve got twelve reviews from three years ago, you’re losing ground to someone who got eight reviews last month. Actively building a review strategy is one of the highest-leverage things a local contractor can do.
Then there’s the content question. Are the pages on your site actually answering the questions people are searching? This is where keyword research comes in, and where most contractor sites leave a lot of traffic on the table. People aren’t just searching “plumber near me.” They’re searching “water heater making noise,” “HVAC tune up before winter,” “should I replace or repair my roof.” If you don’t have pages that answer those questions in your service area, you’re invisible to a significant portion of people who are already in the research phase of hiring someone. Keyword research for contractors is where understanding your customers’ actual search behavior starts to shape what your site should say.
A Realistic Backlink Strategy That Doesn’t Require a PR Budget
Let’s say you buy the premise that backlinks matter and that your DA, or something like it, is worth improving over time. What does that actually look like for a contractor without a huge marketing budget?
Start with the obvious ones. Are you listed on the BBB? Your local chamber of commerce? Do your suppliers have dealer or partner pages with links out to their contractors? Those links are right there and most contractors never ask for them. Your manufacturer certifications probably come with a listing on the manufacturer’s website. Those are real links from real domains.
Local sponsorships are underused. Sponsor a little league team, a school fundraiser, a community event, and more often than not there’s a website somewhere that will mention you. Sometimes with a link. Sometimes without, but even unlinked mentions may help Google understand that you are a real, active local business.
Local press is another one. Not as hard to get as it sounds. If you did a notable job, donated labor to a community project, hired veterans, or just have an interesting story about your business, local news outlets and neighborhood blogs are often looking for content. A single link from a local news site is worth more to your local SEO than fifty links from generic directory sites.
Guest posting on trade association blogs or local business publications is also worth considering. It takes more effort, but the links tend to be cleaner and more contextually relevant, which is what Google is looking for.
A Word About DA Manipulation and Why It Backfires
There’s a whole industry of services that will sell you backlinks. Fifty links for fifty dollars. A thousand links for two hundred. Run from these. Google has gotten very good at identifying manipulative link schemes, and the penalty when you get caught is not a slap on the wrist. It’s a manual action that can tank your rankings entirely, sometimes for months. We’ve seen it happen to contractors who didn’t know what their previous agency was doing on their behalf. The cleanup work is expensive and slow.
What you want are earned links. Links that exist because someone found your content useful, because you have a real relationship with another local business, because you actually did something worth mentioning. Those links are harder to get and they take longer to accumulate, but they build something that can’t be easily erased by an algorithm update.
So Does Domain Authority Matter for Contractors
Here’s where we land. What is domain authority, really? It’s a third-party score that approximates the backlink strength of your website. It correlates with ranking ability. It does not directly cause rankings. And for most local contractors, obsessing over it is the wrong priority.
If your DA is very low, say under 10, and your competitors are all sitting at 25-35, then yes, your backlink profile is probably underdeveloped and worth addressing. But the path to fixing that is not buying links or chasing the score itself. It’s the boring, steady work of building local citations, earning mentions, creating content worth linking to, and showing up consistently in your community.
If you’re newer to thinking about your site’s SEO in any structured way, start with understanding what SEO is and how it works at a foundational level. Then look at your local presence. Then think about content. Backlinks and DA fit somewhere after all of that, not before it.
One more thing worth saying: SEO takes time, full stop. Any metric you’re trying to move, including DA, will not change overnight. A realistic timeline for meaningful movement in local search rankings is three to six months of consistent work, often longer for a brand new site in a competitive market. That’s not a flaw in the process. That’s just how it works. The contractors who rank well didn’t get there with a single campaign push. They built something over time and kept maintaining it.
Domain authority is a useful diagnostic. It’s a reasonable way to benchmark yourself against competitors. It points toward the right kind of work, which is earning credibility on the web the same way you earn it in your community. But it’s not the score you’re trying to beat. It’s a shadow of the thing you’re actually building, which is a real digital presence that people trust and search engines reflect back to searchers who need what you do.
Focus on the substance. The score will follow.
Let’s Take a Look Under the Hood
The best website in the world doesn’t do much if no one can find it. If you’ve invested in a beautiful site but the traffic never showed up, the problem might be what’s happening behind the scenes. Lost & Found Marketing can take a look at your local SEO foundation and show you what’s holding you back. Reach out and let’s talk.