If you want more traffic on your website, you might consider trying to become a topical authority.
So how do you make it work for you? Three key strategies are research, a high-functioning website, and advertising.
What Is Topical Authority?
Topical authority refers to how someone might view your website or webpage as an authority on a particular subject. They will consider you as having depth or specific understanding of a niche topic or broad subject area.
For instance, if you own a website on customer support automation, you could teach businesses how to save costs on customer support services. You could discuss different services that your agency offers, such as 24/7 customer support, live chat, automated workflow, and realistic approaches to customer inquiries. Each of these subjects can show topical authority within the overarching theme of customer service automation.
Having topical authority on a subject can make your website more widely viewed and looked to as a reference. If more people are using your customer service automation website to learn how outsourcing customer service can save costs or increase the customer experience, your site will rise in rankings and become more popular. You will gain “authority” over your chosen subject and discuss potential methods with more people.
If you want to establish proper topical authority, there are several B2B (business to business) strategies you can consider.
Do Your Homework and Research
While research may seem self-explanatory, it’s a crucial step to undertake.
Researching your chosen subject is a great way to learn everything you can about it. The more you know, the more you can truly become an authority on the subject.
Researching also means you will have an easier time explaining a particular subject to your audience. For instance, sticking with the customer service automation analogy, if you provide statistics and professional tips on how much money companies can save by using customer service automation services, more people will view you as an authority.
This also means that more people will come back to or recommend your website to utilize your services and suggestions.
However, understanding your chosen subject isn’t enough. It’s just as essential to research popular questions or even questions that frequently go unanswered. Once you know what your audience craves, you can supply them with the information they need.
Building a knowledgeable platform that people can easily access and understand is one of the first steps to enhancing your brand awareness. The more you become an authority figure on a specialized topic, the more respect you will garner, and the more people will recognize your brand, especially if you are consistent in delivering informative and useful content.
Build a High-Performance Website
Having a high-functioning website means you can provide more information in several ways. For instance, if you want to teach your users how to set up your services, put instructional videos on your site. Videos are 9 times more likely to teach a technique than a wall of text.
Achieving high performance can be as simple as constructing a useful design that easily guides viewers to the information they seek.
Sometimes having too much information available will result in overwhelming your audience. Making your web pages easy to read and navigate can help them find their answers quicker, and it will seem like you know more about what you’re talking about.
Educate Your Audience by Hosting Webinars
One tactic to cultivate high performance is to utilize professional webinar software to attract industry professionals and educate them about your topic. It gives you a great chance to show off your topical authority.
Webinars can provide viewers with quick answers to more complex questions. For example, live webinar software can help you reach a broader audience while offering an elite platform for knowledge. The proper software will also help you follow up with clients through email outreach or interactive polls.
Use Neat Presentation Templates
Similarly, using presentation templates on your website can cut down your word count and instead show what you mean. Treating a webpage as a presentation, wherein you only use your key elements to discuss a topic, can help you get to the meat of your idea without it getting lost.
Even if you know all there is to know about a subject, the way you convey your information will determine how much authority you have over it.
If you can’t properly express yourself, viewers will assume you don’t know what you’re talking about. Showing, or teaching, how to do something instead of telling is a simple way to look as though you’re an expert.
Advertise Smart and Leverage Social Media
Advertising your knowledge via social media can help ramp up your audience. Although research and a stunning website can help showcase your know-how, telling people about it gets the word out faster. If your website has links to a professional Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram account, you can reach a larger audience.
There are plenty of social media outlets and platforms to announce yourself, and this continued branding will help your audience see your consistency and authority for themselves.
If you want more people to follow your website, you can announce your newest uploads or customer testimonials on Twitter. You can even livestream a one-on-one interview with a company that is using your services and let people know ahead of time to tune in. That way, they can see for themselves how your services are helping companies save time and money.
Some platforms can verify your knowledge with tests and certification, like LinkedIn. These kinds of sites offer tests with challenging questions only an expert could answer. If you score certification, it’s obvious that you must know your stuff off by heart. It’s easy to boost your influence on LinkedIn when the site can verify your expertise.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Proper in-depth research, investing in a high-performance website, and advertising via social media can help you to establish topical authority on a subject.
Showing your audience that you have a deep understanding of a topic can be done through answering popular questions, designing your site to be concise and helpful, and utilizing your social media to prove you understand more than the basics. When applied correctly, these three strategies can enhance your website’s prowess and make you stand out from the crowd.