Roughly 80% of marketers have used content marketing as a strategy to boost their online presence and to improve their search engine results page rankings. But content is more than just an SEO booster—it’s also an excellent way to establish your site’s credibility and authority.
Synapse, with our years of experience in amplifying market reach, has always considered content as a crucial factor in boosting a website’s long-term growth. Using content simply as a tool for SEO is a near-sighted approach. Through careful attention to quality, content can also be a powerful factor in establishing your website as a trusted authority, with credible information in your field or industry.
And when your website is considered credible, it builds better trust with your audience. They use your site as reference more often, which leads to organic link building, and consistent long-term traffic as more people visit your site at the recommendation of others.
Why Build Credibility with Content
When you’ve built up your brand and your website’s authority, potential customers begin to rely on your information, and that kind of trust leads to a sale. Brand authority is considered by marketing experts as one of the most significant factors in taking a business from middle-of-the-road to household name within the industry.
It’s especially important to build credibility and authority if you’re a company in a crowded field. For example, if you’re a company that offers fitness coaching services, your website can hold valuable, updated information about recent health and fitness trends.
If you have quality, in-depth content about the subject, your audience will keep referring to your website for information. Such content includes diet tips, exercise regimes, and discussions on the merits of health supplements.
Your brand’s name eventually becomes more familiar to them and others that they share that information with others, who will also consider your site as a trusted source. It builds up your brand as one that is very knowledgeable on fitness subjects, providing credible data that people can rely on. Best of all, now that your site has become a repository of this information, users will repeatedly come back to learn more.
Tracking Your Brand’s Authority
Your brand and your website’s authority are the trust that it has gained from the audience. It’s how much you’re considered as the leader in the industry. The best way to track it is by looking into analytics, feedback, and the temperament of your target audience.
Find out how people see and interact with your brand. Look through the competition and determine whose name stands out the most, or who gets mentioned the most by your target audiences. If your website is regularly earning organic backlinks and being mentioned as a reference in online publications, it’s an indicator that you are steadily growing in authority.
Ways to Establish Credibility Through Content
Use data and statistics to support, but don’t focus on them
When you establish an idea, reinforce it with data and statistics. Taking the fitness brand example once again—if you claim that acai berries are not the superfood that many health brands claim it to be, you can back it up with sources from scientific studies that verify that statement.
It’s important to back your idea up with data, but it also shouldn’t be the focus of your content. They should only serve as reinforcements to the ideas that you state on your site. The statistics and data should underscore and increase the impact of your original statement. They shouldn’t be your statement itself.
Present quotes and information from subject matter experts (SMEs)
Just like data and statistics, direct information from subject matter experts is a significant boost to your content quality. People with first-hand experience or expertise in the topic being discussed are seen as highly reliable sources.
With their knowledge validating your claims and ideas, the content becomes more impactful because they come from a specialist with certification or expertise on it.
Furthermore, most people trust other people more than faceless entities or companies. With the backing of a subject matter expert, the audience is more likely to put trust your content.
For example, if you decide to discuss effective cardiovascular exercises, having a certified athletic trainer or a physiologist can help reinforce your statements in the content.
Keep your content updated
There are many benefits to having the most updated content possible. To start, it keeps the content on your website fresh and interesting, with your audience able to get the latest news as soon as possible. Every time they visit your website, they’ll have new content to consume.
Furthermore, the most updated content is often considered the most accurate. Rapid developments in current events require updating your data. By having the latest data on your site, you show that your content is reliable.
It also benefits you for SERP rankings, as Google checks if your content was recently updated, and would rank it higher as it’s a source for more current information.
Answer questions
Take the time to determine what questions your audience is asking. You could gain important insights on what topics to cover next by checking the questions they ask customer support or observing the comments being left on your content.
Answering questions shows that you’re paying attention to the audience and what they’re interested in. And by responding to them, your brand displays its knowledge while giving them the help that they need. It shows them that they can trust you with their questions and that you’ll provide insightful answers from them.
A great way to do this is to create a Frequently Asked Questions section. You can also have a weekly “Askbox” update, where you gather questions from your audience and answer them in a post.
Fill Your Site with Credible Content
One of the best ways to efficiently fill your website with credible, high-quality content is to reach out to digital marketers and content specialists. Not only are these specialists able to quickly provide you with the kind of authoritative content that you need, but they can also employ the best practices for content marketing that maximize your reach.
Synapse specializes in digital asset services that include content services. Our specialists can create updated, well-researched content backed up by credible data. We will build a collection of high-quality content on your webpage, boosting your brand’s authority. Contact us today to get started, or read more about the kind of digital asset services that we offer.