Search Engine Optimization: you either love it or hate it.
Whatever side of the fence you sit on, one thing is abundantly clear: the benefits of strong SEO can transform your business for the better on a huge scale.
With a solid SEO strategy that genuinely works, you could:
- Gain a consistent stream of traffic to your website
- Capture more leads
- Market to a warmer audience
- Build your brand’s name
- Position your brand as a figure of authority within the industry
- Beat your competition
- Speak to a more targeted demographic, thus increasing your chances of sales
- Ultimately, earn more money
However, it’s not an easy thing to master, especially when you consider that Google and other search engines constantly change their ranking criteria.
There are three pillars of SEO that remain consistent. If you want to optimize your site to appear on the search engine results page (SERP), you’ll need to build upon these three pillars.
The Three Pillars of SEO
Every strategy you put in place needs to build blocks upon each of the SEO pillars. These are the fundamental qualities that search engines evaluate when ranking them on results pages:
- Authority
- Relevance
- Trust
Think of these three pillars as the branches from the SEO root. Without these three branches, you’ll never gain the sweet apples of SEO success.
But what do each of these branches mean?
SEO Authority
Your SEO authority stems from how you convey subject knowledge within your industry. To gain this, you must become an authoritative figure in your field. But more about this later.
SEO Relevance
The SEO relevance relies on how well your content matches the searcher’s intent. How relevant is your site to the query a person typed into Google? Keyword research is significant here, alongside high-quality content.
SEO Trust
Though you might guess that the trust factor of a site may be tricky for search engines to pick up on, it’s all based on the quality, authenticity, and actionability of your content. Link building plays a huge role in building trust.
What Is Link Building?
Arguably, link building is the hardest element of SEO. It consists of 2 types of links:
- Internal links
- External links
Search engines determine the credibility of your content based on the links pointing toward your site. Both these types of links will help boost your backlink count, but they’re from different places.
What Is An Internal Link In SEO?
An internal link refers to a link that points to another page of your site. For example, say I owned a website called www.seomaster.com.
Imagine I ran a blog on that site, and I posted an article about link building.
The next post I publish revolves around the difficulties of SEO.
In that article, I reference my own previous post about link building, which I can use as a hyperlink to point toward the original article.
That’s an internal link because it’s under the same domain..
What Is An External Link In SEO?
In contrast, an external link comes from another site.
Let’s take the same example. My site, seomaster.com, focuses on gaining more traffic to a business’s website. Imagine a copywriter references something I’ve said in my original article, The Difficulties of SEO. That copywriter will then provide a link to my article.
That helps to build my backlink count through external links.
It sounds pretty basic when phrased this way. However, in practice, external link building is one of the hardest things about SEO.
Why Is External Link Building So Hard?
Any marketer or business owner who implements an SEO strategy will tell you that building external links is one of the most difficult parts of the SEO puzzle.
That’s because you’re relying on third party entities.
Compare the two examples I gave when explaining the difference between internal and external links.
The first – internal links – is an easy strategy to implement. It can even encourage you to write about certain topics, generating content ideas from your existing content.
The second, however, – external links – only happen if another site decides to reference your content.
This can become easy when you’re ranking at the top of the SERPs, but until then, your content will be very tricky to find. People tend to stick to the first 2 pages of the results page, so if you’re on page 8, you’re unlikely to gain many external links.
The power is no longer yours when you’re trying to build external links.
But, our strategy will help you gain external links with the power back in your own hands.
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is a popular marketing tactic, however, many people struggle to achieve thought leader status. With a world full of competition, it’s important to understand what it is, what it does, the difficulties, and how you can utilize it to build your brand.
What Is Thought Leadership?
Thought leadership is a marketing strategy which focuses on making your brand (and site) an authority within your field. The aim of the thought leadership strategy is to become a dominant leader in the industry.
What Makes Thought Leadership The Best Marketing Strategy?
Thought leadership is one of the most comprehensive and organic ways to boost your external backlink count. This means you don’t have a cost of investment, but, instead, a time and energy investment.
It’s well worth it.
Being a thought leader will give you:
- More trust from your leads
- Increased brand awareness
- The authority to be the go-to in your industry.
- A broader opportunity to launch new offers
- Higher conversion rate
- A lower cost per acquisition for your paid marketing campaigns, (if you choose to do so).
By far, the most transformative benefit on this list is the increase of trust.
Every business out there will cease to function without the trust of their demographic because, without trust, the audience will not buy. Without sales, a business goes bust.
Why Do Business Owners Fail To Become Thought Leaders?
Truthfully, business owners are far more capable of becoming thought leaders than they tell themselves. However, it is a long-term strategy. The journey is a challenging one and it’ll take time, dedication, and effort to get there.
Many business owners become impatient or fearful.That lack of patience or abundance of fear blocks their ability to become a thought leader. So, they get in their own way.
Being a thought leader means gaining exposure everywhere you can. It means getting out there and proving to the world that you have a deep knowledge of your industry, and your business provides extreme value.
With the pressure on, many business owners suffer from an intense case of ‘imposter syndrome’ and, because the results aren’t immediate, they give up.
Though the journey comes with obstacles, the prize is worth it.
What Does Thought Leadership Look Like?
The beauty of thought leadership is that there are opportunities everywhere.
From contributor articles and guest posts, appearances in podcasts, interviews, guest-teachers in webinars, collaborations – there are so many formats that’ll help you become a thought leader.
Everything you’re a guest on is a chance to progress your level of thought leadership.
How To Get Started To Become A Thought Leader
To become a thought leader, you must take the initiative and take that first step.
Before anything, you must master the mindset of a thought leader.
The main reason people fail with this marketing strategy is because they stand in their own way. Whether that’s due to a lack of confidence, fear of failure, overwhelm, or impatience, it ends because of themselves.
That’s why it’s so crucial to first understand your goals. You can then draw strategies for how you’ll make them happen.
Then, get yourself out there.
Feel free to start small with community events, speak at your alma mater, and do small time interviews for smaller sites.
Just start building your authority.
How Does Thought Leadership Link To SEO?
When you’re posting on other people’s sites, or starring in their content, you’ll inspire and gain attention from their leads. The loyal fans of their brand’s sites will become interested in who you are, what you do, and the value you offer.
And that’s where we refer back to SEO, specifically through external link building.
At the end of your contribution – wherever you post your publication details – make sure you provide a link that points to your site.
You can even build external links within your content. Use links that point to one or more of your own articles. That’ll increase your external link count, even though you placed it, and search engines will register that it came from another site. This way, you’ll gain more external links and boost your SEO as well.
The bottom line is: the more you get your brand out there through guest posts, interviews, collaborations – anything you’re invited to by another brand – the more you can build external links that travel readers, listeners, or viewers back to your site.
Power Your SEO Strategy with Digital PR
No doubt, establishing yourself as a thought leader will increase your SEO rankings.
Still not sure where to begin? With the help of digital PR, you can boost your reputation, elevate your online presence, and secure your title as a thought leader in your industry.
—————-Author Bio Below
Jason started freelancing in SEO back in college, sold his first agency, and now is founder of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends, catching up on reading, and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.
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