In an article published by Adam Dorfman on Search Engine Watch, he took a look at 4 factors that should play bigger in Local SEO  for 2014. Number one on the list was Improving Brand/Domain Authority.

Domain Authority is a big factor over at Moz who defines it, “Domain Authority represents Moz’s best prediction for how a website will perform in search engine rankings. Use Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or tracking the “strength” of your website over time. We calculate this metric by combining all of our other link metrics—linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc.—into a single score.”

From the article:

1. Improving Brand/Domain Authority

The shift from keywords to context that started with the Panda updates in 2011 and culminated, most recently, with the Hummingbird update last August have had a clear impact on domain and brand authority, major facets of SEO. These two factors now matter more than ever.

Targeting micro sets of tail end keywords with thin content pages is a tactic that lost a great deal of effectiveness with the Panda release, and with the Hummingbird update, the tactic is poised to go the way of other previously killer SEO techniques that eventually became ineffective like microsites and PageRank sculpting with nofollow tags.

What will matter more is how authoritative searchers and Google view a site relative to any given topic.

Does the site offer the information searchers need? Will it keep visitors on the site after their initial visit? Will they visit again based on the content? Or does the site simply contain pages just to manipulate the search results?

These are the types of questions Google is trying to answer as it orders its search results, and it gets better at this every year.

Read the other 3 factors on Search Engine Watch