Growth Hacks for Leveling up Your Bulbasaur

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Domain Authority is a 0-100 score that says how likely your website is to rank on Google.

The higher the score your website is, the more traffic you can get.

And since this traffic is organic (rather than a paid ad), people trust it more. It’s more likely to convert.

How I think about Domain Authority

I think of Domain Authority like levels in a video game.

When your Bulbasaur (a baby monster in Pokémon) is a meager level 5, it will lose a lot, and it can’t use the skills to get you past geographic elements on the world map.

If there’s a tree in your way, you can’t cut it down.

If there’s a dark cave, you can’t illuminate it.

So what do you do?

You battle. You take chances, and every win, you get a bit stronger. Your level increases.

Now you can beat Pokémon that used to defeat you.

Now you can light that cave.

You keep battling.

You evolve. You learn new techniques.

You can cut down that tree.

You can visit way more places.

The things you couldn’t access before open to you, and they allow you to get more experience than ever. You level up, and you level up, and you level up.

Domain Authority in SEO (search engine optimization) is very similar to this, except unlike getting experience in Pokémon, the more Domain Authority you get, the faster you can get it.

In Pokémon, you can only grow at a linear rate.

With Domain Authority, if you reinvest properly into the right funnel and features, you can grow far faster than you did at the beginning.

How to measure Domain Authority

One of my favorite marketing tools, period, is the MozBar Chrome Extension.

This is what it looks like:

Here’s the Domain Authority for some popular websites:

YouTube: 100
Facebook: 96
Google Home: 94
Politico: 92
Loom: 72
Mailchimp: 92
Slack: 90
Architectural Digest: 84
Vogue: 89
Louis Vuitton: 89

How websites acquire Domain Authority

Your Domain Authority increases when you get links from other websites.

You want as many high Domain Authority websites as possible linking to your website as this will increase your Domain Authority faster.

Growth hacks for acquiring Domain Authority

Launching on Product Hunt.

This is the easiest in terms of effort.
Product Hunt is the #1 spot for launching technology products, but recently, people have used it to launch (and get links to) information-based products.
- Example: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/saas-funding-napkin-2023
  - This is literally a chart drawn on a napkin, lol.
  - The poster had the napkin hosted on Medium. If you were trying to build Domain Authority, you would instead have it hosted on your own website.
It’s typical for Product Hunt to result in links from high Domain Authority websites. I’ve had this happen many times.

If you have an app, adding a share feature.

Loom is a great example. You link to your Loom screen recording, and Loom builds its Domain Authority.
Loom constantly has a high velocity of links and, as a result, can show up on Google for very competitive and lucrative keywords.

Targeting keywords that get you links.

This is my favorite “rich get richer” scenario with Domain Authority.
I once used my Domain Authority to show up on Google for “[My Niche] Article Submission.”
People in my niche wanted to write guest articles to social-proof their brand. They would Google publications to write for. My app’s blog would show up!
They would write free articles for us then share the articles on their own websites and with their communities.
This is a good alternative for a “share feature” if you don’t have an app.