Building SEO authority is crucial to both your rankings on Google and to converting visitors to your site into customers. Google’s search engines base their rankings on E-A-T: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. You are already an expert at your business, now let’s look at how to translate that skill into authority, and that Authority into high SERP (search engine result page) ranking and more paying customers.
Content is King
Posting content to just have posted content is not enough to gain authority in the eyes of Google or visitors to your site. This is where having a quality strategy content plan comes into play. Having quality content that answers people’s questions, engages their interest, or meets a need like being able to solve a problem, or improve their quality of life establishes your site as an expert source of information. This then makes your site an authority that they can trust the next time they have a problem, issue, or need. In addition to being helpful and trustworthy, your content needs to connect with user’s searches. Not only is this helpful to your customers and potential customers, but it also helps search engine bots to see how relevant your posts are, which will improve your site’s ranking.
Quality Backlinks
While your excellent content will establish authority with your readers and generate good word-of-mouth referrals, it alone isn’t enough to establish authority with search engines. The other main way that Google evaluates a site’s authority is with its number of quality backlinks. (However, having quality backlinks also helps humans by giving them access to good content.)
Quality backlinks tell search engines and people alike that your site has authority. Think about it like a referral from a trustworthy source—if you’re looking for a handyperson to fix that refrigerator, and your favorite handyperson is busy, so they refer you to one of their colleagues. You’re more likely to trust this referral from a trustworthy authority who has already established expertise in your experiences with them than you would trust someone that you found on Google. (Although, if the person you found on Google had a five-star rating and many positive, glowing reviews, that is also a way of establishing authority.)
The term “link equity” is, according to moz.com, “a search engine ranking factor based on the idea that certain links pass value and authority from one page to another. This value is dependent on several factors, such as the linking page’s authority, topical relevance, HTTP status, and more. Links that pass equity are one of the many signals that Google and other search engines use to determine a page’s ranking in the SERPs.”. So, not all backlinks are created equal. For example, if The New York Times linked back to your site, that’s an example of link equity. But if a website with poor SEO links to your site, it isn’t as helpful to establishing your authority. How do you assess link equity? Here are a few ways.
1. Relevancy
Link relevancy is important. The page linking to your site needs to relate to the content on your webpage. Google can assess relevancy.
2. Authoritative Backlinks
The site linking to your site via backlink needs to be authoritative in its own right to count as a quality backlink.
3. Links in Body Content
Links in the body of content are more valuable than links in sidebars or footers. The link location tells users and Google how important the link is.
4. Primary Links
If there are hundreds of other links on the page, not only will it be hard for a user to find the link, but it tells Google that it isn’t an important link.
Link Building Tools
There are many ways to gain high-quality backlinks. Link building tools like one’s from Moz.com, SEMRush, and AHREFS help with keyword research and site assessment, in addition to help with link building. While Haro and ProfNet connect you with people who are looking for your expertise, and who will then link back to your site in their blog post or article.
These tools and others like them will also be able to help you assess your link profile, which is a basic assessment of how good your backlinks are. This will give you a starting point for building your authority through link equity.
Build Your Website’s Authority with Help from CadenceSEO’s Team of Authority Experts
CadenceSEO knows how important it is to establish your brand as an authority for your customers as well as for search engines. They know how to build quality content that answers people’s questions as well as helping your site rank higher with Google.
Their team of SEO experts and consultants can look at your backlink-building strategy or help you create one from scratch. Gaining quality backlinks can become effortless with help from CadenceSEO!
For more information about how to grow your authority with customers and search engines, contact us here at CadenceSEO. We know how to grow your SEO authority.
