For those that are looking to enter the online arena, there is a lot of pre-work that needs to be done before even getting online. You want to be able to understand what you’re trying to achieve, not only systemically but with your digital voice as well. Learning and understanding all the key terms, relevant metrics and the right tools will help give you the confidence to establish authority in your industry.
These are the ways to start establishing your authority from zero:
- Choose Your Channel
- Start Creating Content
- Be Consistent
- Pay Attention To Your SEO Needs
- Engage Your Community
- Work On Inbound Links
- Stay On Top Of Everything
Before we discuss each of these, let’s start from the beginning…
What is Authority or EAT?
What are we talking about when it comes to authority? It basically means that you are a thought leader in a specific market or industry and that your content is the right mix of being fresh, relevant, authentic and accurate. The concept behind this is that anyone who reaches your site and absorbs the information you’ve provided will have gotten the right type of information.
As Google is the prominent search engine, that’s where your focus should be. You want to be able to understand what its web crawlers are looking for. It follows an algorithm that looks for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness and is thus called E-A-T for short.
E – Expertise
Here Google is looking for the level of expertise the website or the author has. It’s looking for any accolades, awards, degrees, and other forms of recognition when scoring for this metric.
A – Authoritativeness
This entire scoring metric is related to what the great web says about the website. What are the reviews, comments and overall feedback users give to the site? The more positive and numerous they are the more authoritative. Regarding the author, it’s about how many citations they have, and how good their content is written.
T – Trustworthiness
The final metric in this algorithm is about how easy it is to find information on them. Is there contact information, address, an About Us section on a website? Is the site secure, whether you’re browsing or buying something? When it comes to scoring trust with the author it revolves again about the number of citations they have and if they are on other high scoring E-A-T sites.
Where Should You Start Building Your Authority?
Before even typing one word on your blog or building out your business plan, you need to focus. That means getting yourself into a niche. The more specialised you are, the more you can become a subject matter expert and eventually an authority in that domain.
This is where early influencers became so popular early on. They only focused on one item, such as the perfect eyeliner tips and tricks, or focused on one video game to represent. This eventually had them grow into businesses that could expand and branch out.
Yet, at the start, you want to pick something as niche as possible. So, for example, if you’re specialised in the beauty and social media areas, then consider just Instagram promotion related to certain skin care treatments instead of something vague such as beauty social media expert. This will help the rest of the necessary ingredients and tips out there work a lot easier with you.
Choose Your Channel
Don’t just say, ‘I’m going to be on everything,’ but choose how you’re going to push your message out there. You cannot do everything as there’s simply only one of you in the beginning, and the whole theme here is a targeted and focused approach. You can create a blog, start a channel, establish social followings or build a website.
That goes the same with the software tools that you’re looking at. If you’re going towards the social media route, then consider tools such as HootSuite, Sprout Social Or Zoho to help build your burgeoning empire.
If you’re looking into graphic design and presentations or graphs and charts as your medium, then consider tools such as Canva, PowerPoint, Adobe Express and many others.
On the other hand, maybe you’re into pushing your knowledge and skill directly into content and heavy content at that. Then you’re talking about distributing your knowledge through eBooks and related software such as Calibre or Kindle Create.
There’s no shortage of optimal channels, but it’s still all about focusing on what those channels will be.
Start Creating Content
This is a bit of an understatement, but now that you have your digital canvas and channels ready, it’s time to produce that content and a lot more of it than you thought you ever would. That’s right; now it’s time to build those presentations, make those video guides, or write those eBooks and get them out there on your site and ready to be found by Google and other search engines out there.
Make sure here it’s truly about your authenticity. Don’t be salesy or try to push your product onto others. Just stick to being an expert and also being transparent. Share your wealth of knowledge with others, and don’t worry if you think you’re giving them everything for free.
That level of being real and authentic is what people will require to start building a high level of trust with you and keep coming back with you, which leads to the next piece of advice.
Be Consistent
Don’t write or distribute the most fantastic content once and think it’s enough. You will need not only to show your authority through your knowledge share but also show it to the algorithms powering the search engines in the background.
You want to have a dependable and consistent schedule when you post your blogs or videos or whatever your content choice is. This is because true authority is always learning itself and sharing that knowledge with its growing user base.
You want to have people coming back to see what is new and relevant, what is trendy and the hot topic of the day. So build yourself the right type of discipline and stick to a content schedule as you’ll be able to make a routine out of it and start grabbing that well-deserved authority.
You’re also showing that you are committed to the topic as you put up your time and energy to producing this fresh and relevant content as often as possible.
Pay Attention To Your SEO Needs
No it’s not coding we’re talking about (except a little meta-tagging), but understanding what search optimisation is. Work with tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush or Yoast that will help you ensure your content is SEO friendly and that the way it’s posted on your site has the right type of tagging and meta description. This is important when search engines first look at your site and ‘crawl it’ to be able to find and track it and give it good authority metrics.
You’ll be surprised that writing authentically is an SEO way in many ways as well. With just a few touch-ups, your passionate article about your hobby turned career can be a masterpiece in the eyes of SEO and start getting you the visibility needed for authority. Also, the technical aspects such as meta-tagging on your site can be done easily by site builders such as Wix or Square without actually typing in code.
Engage Your Community
This is a big one. You don’t want the conversation to be one-sided, where you’re dropping knowledge and not listening to your captive audience. Whereas you want to focus on niche and directed channels, the way you receive your communication should be on common social media channels or thru responding to comments, as this will help you engage the largest audience.
It can also be via messaging and emails if you can actively speak and participate with the community you’re forming up.
This also helps connect you with like-minded individuals and other players in the arena that will help you become open to collaboration and strengthen your focused push in the digital universe.
Work On Inbound Links
A final component that needs to be considered is working on inbound links. When you’re able to be focused on stellar content and engaged communities, then it’s all about this end result. This is what you’re really aiming for from a systemic point of view when it comes to authority.
Inbound links are when other websites post links that direct their users to your website. This is a great way to display your authority because that means they’re referencing a point you made and telling their hard-earned audience to go to your site for more information and insight.
Search engines love this, and it’s also essential to check the health of these inbound links that they come from legitimate active sites because the opposite can also happen when there’s the appearance of inbound links coming from dead sites, so always be careful.
This is a true challenge at the start, so you need to be patient as well. A great way to get this happening sooner than later is to consider becoming a guest blogger or content producer for another site, with the intention of getting yourself some sort of reference or inbound link to your content as well. You may be helping out their content and SEO needs, but you’ll be helping yourself out in the long run.
Stay On Top Of Everything
Now that you’ve got your action plan, it’s important to build the right type of regime to stay on top of everything. You want to utilise those SEO tools to scrap older content or refresh them with updated information and links, and always make sure to stay ahead of the information curve. After all, if you’re the authority on a subject, then others will be coming to you to get their information for their own content blogs, sites and graphics.
No matter what, this is a long-term strategy, and you’ll need to be patient throughout. It takes time for SEO to activate properly and for domain authority to grow and stay that way.
Don’t rush into this thinking that you’ve seen ways to get yourself as an authority overnight because those types of sites end up fizzling out quickly. Once you know you’re dedicated to your specific niche and focused on that cause, then put in your passion through the time and effort it takes to build out sustainable authority.
Final Thoughts
Establishing an authority is not easy, it will take a lot of hard work and consistency in order for your site to be ranked by Google. However, many people have been a testament of this and was able to succeed despite the hurdles and anxiety of not seeing any results during the first year or first few months of their channel or blog.