You want your site to rank well on any given search engine results page (SERP). One of the best ways to achieve that? Have incredible, authoritative content. But just what makes content “authoritative” anyway?
Leave the guesswork out of SERP positions. Learn what authoritative content means and how you can improve any page’s authority through a thorough content marketing plan.
5 Ways to Make Authoritative Content
Several factors mesh together to make a piece of content authoritative in the eyes of Google and other search engines. What typically matter most, however, are:
- Relevancy
- Readability
- Speed
- Trustworthiness
- Links
Improvements to any of the factors mentioned above may help push your page in SERP position.
1. Relevancy
When you ask questions online, which pages do you go to for answers? The ones that have the answers you need right away, or the ones that bury the answers under mountains of irrelevant content? We’re going to guess you chose the former, and that’s the type of content that search engines prioritize.
After all, users want results that answer their questions quickly, correctly, and in an easy-to-understand manner. These components help make content authoritative in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
To make your page appear higher in SERPs for your chosen keyword, you need to do two things:
- Take the time to thoroughly research a topic.
- See what it is that users want to know.
For example, if people are searching for “cat toys,” what does your target audience want to know? Where to buy toys, which ones are safe, or what toys to get for kittens? All of the above? Who is asking these questions?
Take the time to decide who your audience is and what their questions are. This process will help you know how to best organize and optimize your content for your chosen audience and keywords. It can also help you better target your audience if you are running paid search campaigns on your content.
TF-IDF
Platforms like Google know if your page is relevant to someone’s query by using term frequency-inverse document frequency, or TF-IDF. TF-IDF shows what words or phrases are of central importance to your page. In other words, pages that contain your target keyword and related phrases at a certain frequency are more likely to have higher SERP positions for that target keyword.
It’s important to understand that this does not mean that you should shove your keyword and similar (but awkwardly worded) phrases into your document, a technique known as keyword stuffing. Google and other search engines will actually penalize you for this practice.
A better approach is to make sure your document contains your target keyword and relevant phrases in ways that feel natural.
2. Readability
People don’t just want relevant information. They want well-written content that is grammatically correct, organized, and easy to read. That means you need to pay attention to the details when crafting your page.
For starters, don’t ignore grammar, spelling, and punctuation. In fact, one Website Planet study found that pages riddled with typos have an 85% higher bounce rate (rate at which people leave the page) than pages without errors. In the study, this bounce rate translated to users spending 8% less time on a typo-filled page compared to clean pages.
You also need to keep everything organized. Make sure that your page uses proper headings and content is ordered in a sensible way. That helps readers find the information they need easily and can even help them find related content, all of which may give them a better page experience. In fact, well-organized content that allows users to easily jump between relevant pages on your site may increase the total time they spend on your site (which is great news for you).
Finally, write to your audience’s level. There are fortunately plenty of affordable tools, such as Readable, that rate your content’s readability using tests like the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid readability tests. Adjust how complicated your writing is based on these results.
For example, your page is not going to be relevant to your target audience if they are 8th-grade students and the content is written at a postgraduate level. In these cases, there’s some truth to the old saying that you shouldn’t use a $5 word when a 50-cent one will do. In addition to adjusting the words you use, you can also use active voice more often and simplify sentence structure to adjust readability.
3. Speed
Google loves pages that load quickly. Google’s Core Web Vitals update means that your page’s SERP ranking takes a hit if it loads slowly.
Users like swift load times, too. In fact, research shows that users are likely to leave your page within seconds if it does not load properly. That means you want everything on your page optimized to load as soon as possible so that you can reduce bounce rates.
4. Trustworthiness
If you’re looking for medical information online, are you more likely to trust an article from Mayo Clinic or someone unknown, uncredentialed person’s blog?
Your site’s overall trustworthiness can help establish it as an authority in the industry. There are plenty of ways to increase the credibility of your site, including:
- Consistently host factually accurate content, so users know they can trust all of your content.
- Provide full bios (with pictures!) for the site’s team, such as editors. These bios show your users that your site’s content is produced by real people with credentials, not a bot.
- Create a fully fleshed-out About Us page with a real-world location for your company. People want to know that your company is legitimate and that it has a mission relevant to the site’s content.
Links also play a key role in establishing site and page trustworthiness, both for search engines and users.
5. Links
Links are the lifeblood of your site; you can’t have a healthy page without them. There are two primary kinds of links, internal and external, and they are both important for improving your content’s authority.
Internal Links
Internal links are links between pages within your site. These links should use relevant anchor texts (the words you hyperlink) and connect to pages with similar or related content. When used properly, internal links help Google better understand what a page’s content is all about. This knowledge may mean that Google can better determine if your content is relevant to search queries.
External Links
External links are links between sites. Ideally, your content has links to other reputable sites (outgoing or outbound links) and links to it from other sites (inbound links or backlinks).
Outbound links to reputable sites can increase your content’s authority by showing that you have done your research.
For example, say you are writing a page about the seasonal flu. Users want to know that you know what you are talking about; citing your sources is one of the best ways to achieve that trust. That means using the World Health Organization or CDC as references can lend trustworthiness and authority to your content.
Just remember that you want outbound links to open in a new page, as that can reduce bounce rates from your own site and increase users’ total time spent on your page.
Just as you link to other sites, so too can other sites link back to your site. These backlinks lend an incredible amount of authority to both your website and the specific content the other site is linking to. If you establish yourself as a reliable resource in your industry, backlinks should come to your content naturally.
And you need these backlinks to come organically. Buying backlinks is frowned upon by Google and other major search engines. If search engines discover that you are buying backlinks, it can mean that your site is severely punished.
WANT AUTHORITATIVE CONTENT? CONTACT THE EXPERTS
At the end of the day, content’s authority primarily comes from it being relevant and easy to read; it should be designed to answer a user’s search query in a straightforward, easily digestible manner. Optimizing the page, links, and more all help the page “score better” on search platforms, but all the optimization in the world cannot make up for poorly written content.
The solution? Don’t skimp out on the actual writing process. Learn your target audience and research your topic thoroughly. Craft content that is useful to them, is full of quality links, and ultimately provides them with a quality experience. Not only will your users be grateful, but, over time, search engines will reward your page by pushing it up their SERP rankings.
If you want specific guidance on how to improve your page’s SERP position, contact us here at Digital Strike. We can run a full analysis of your site and content’s health and help you get started on improving your content’s authority.
Kristen Greif
Learn more about Kristen Greif
