Establishing niche authority: leveraging strategic content as a key differentiator – Search Engine Watch

Whether you are new to SEO or an experienced SEO junkie, one cannot deny the importance of content to rank well on search engines such as Google and Bing.

Google has often referred to the notion that ‘content is king’ and have made the use of content very key to their algorithms over the years. Such as E-E-A-T update (expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness) and last month’s Google Helpful Content Update which either rewarded or downgraded websites based on the quality and helpfulness of their content.

With this in mind, we speak to some industry experts and growing businesses to understand how they use content to build authority in their industry.

Create guides with statistics

“For a new or existing brand, it is always helpful to add blog posts and guides to their website,” explains Richard Allan, co-founder of energy startup, Warmable.

“Having lots of content shows that you have substance and a website with 50 pages and posts is likely to outrank a site with just 5 or 10.”

However, making this content statistic driven and honing in on real things that people are looking for is a very good way to gain authority.

“So rather than adding the top 10 tips for this or how to save money on that, consider phrases such as these below and be sure to add key statistics high up the page and in the meta-data to make it stand out in the SERPs.”

• What percentage of people use ….
• What is the number of people that …
• How many people do / do not ….
• How much money can be saved by …
• How many people in the US/UK are …
• How much is this (name) industry worth?
• How many people in the US use …

“A lot of users and indeed journalists are looking for that killer statistic, so you need to be able to show it very early and clearly and have it backed up by a strong source.”

“You will also find that this helps with natural link building because if you rank top for a good phrase or statistical-based question, a journalist will naturally link to you and very often they just take one of the first sources that they see on Google as fact. You would be surprised how many simple and quality links you could generate.”

The layout of the content is key

“How you present your content is very important,” explains Justine Gray of content platform, Trending Impact. 

To be truly educational, authoritative and informative, you have to make the content very palatable and easy to digest. This can be as simple as adding key bullet points in the beginning of the piece of content to give an overview, using short paragraphs to make clear points and using graphs or images with data to make it stand out. Importantly, you need to get into the information early on and avoid waffling for the sake of increasing the word count.

“A nice feature to organise your text includes using accordion tabs for FAQs, dropdown menus and clickable tabs at the top of the page that take you straight to the desired section,” says Gray.

Use people and use authority figures

Google has added more weighting to the use of authors, guest writers and real expertise behind any guides or blog posts.

With reference to the recent Google Helpful Content Update, webmasters will gain greater authority from having a real face or team member clearly stated as the author on a piece of content, including landing pages and blog posts. 

Saying things such as ‘reviewed by’ and ‘edited by’ will add a lot of credibility, especially if it has a bio which includes relevant qualifications or suggests years of experience – and this is perfect for medical and financial industries. 

Additionally, authors can add their Linkedin and Twitter profile to their bio for added effect.

“We have found that using guest writers who are experts in their fields adds great value,” explains Dr Max Linden, founder of The Hawker Online. “Finding people who run companies, have followers or like putting themselves out there is a good place to start.

“Not only is guest and expertly contributed content more insightful and personable, but you can share it on your social network and theirs too to maximize reach.”

Don’t just use text, use video

“As we all know today, content is not just textual but highly visual,” informs Dean Benzaken, co-founder of Techvolutionary.

“With the help of AI, there are a lot of ways to take your existing content and quickly turn it into voice notes that people can click and hear on the page.”

In addition, videos add great value to any piece of content, and you have some superb tools to help you facilitate this today. So, if you have a long video, you can use Opus to break it down into 10 smaller videos with captions included, or you can use Synthesia to create an AI avatar to auto-generate the text. The opportunities are vast to make your content standout and to create authority in your space.