Becoming an authoritative brand is no easy feat, but the massive benefits are worth the effort.
When you’ve built authority, potential customers and clients begin to count on you and trust you — and it’s hard to imagine that trust not leading to a sale (at some point).
But how exactly can a brand begin to build, or build upon, their authority? Content is an excellent way, and in this article, I’ll go through my tips on how it can be done.
1. Answer your audience’s questions
If you’re not doing this, there’s virtually no way you’ll become an authority. People grow to rely on brands when those brands provide the information they’re looking for, so if your content marketing doesn’t incorporate those answers, you’re not demonstrating to your audience why they should trust you.
By building on-site content that provides this kind of value, you can build authority while simultaneously building more awareness for your brand. In other words, you can position yourself as an expert for those who don’t already know you.
Search is a huge component of why this content tactic works. Google does a significant amount of curation for users, choosing what it thinks is the most appropriate results for a particular query. When users see that you’re ranking at the top for a certain keyword or topic, there’s an assumption you made it through the algorithm for good reason and know what you’re talking about.
As an example, I searched “shoe size chart,” which, according to Keyword Surfer[1], gets 49,500 monthly searches in the U.S. alone. Here’s one of the top results[2] from Famous Footwear:
Presumably, people are searching for this because they want to buy shoes, but they’re not sure what size to get. If they click this