It is important for business owners and marketers alike to understand the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO allows your brand to gain a strong reputation and be considered an authority within the industry, among many other benefits. For this reason, brand owners spend their time, money, and effort on perfecting an SEO strategy that works for their business.
However, it’s not an easy strategy to master. There are many factors and variables that need to line up to achieve ultimate SEO success.
Let’s take a deeper look into thought leadership and how, if implemented correctly, your website will reap the benefits of SEO.
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One Of The Biggest SEO Difficulties: Link Building
SEO is the root of a tree with multitudinous branches. Each branch represents a different element that stems from a functional SEO strategy. The link building branch, however, is one of the windiest, most challenging branches of SEO.
Why is link building so tricky? Because it relies on 3rd party entities providing a link to your site in their content. If you can’t get a high-quality website to agree to reference you and include a link to your site in their content, then your SEO will suffer.
And that’s where thought leadership comes into play.
Thought Leadership
This type of leader is one of the most organic and holistic ways to link build.
It gives your business the opportunity to build its brand and credibility, with which comes the trust of your prospects. While doing so, you’re also able to build links to your site.
What Is Thought Leadership?
Thought leadership is a strategy that content marketers often use. It focuses on building credibility and placing your brand as an authoritative resource within your industry.
The goal of becoming a thought leader is to be viewed as an expert within your niche and become acknowledged as the ‘go-to’ brand.
What Can Thought Leadership Do For My Brand?
If done correctly and strategically, thought leadership can lead to SEO success, brand awareness within your target demographic, more leads, and a wider-spread brand reputation.
What Does Thought Leadership Look Like?
Thought leadership can come in many forms. Contributor (or guest) posts and articles, podcast appearances, interviews, guest webinars, to name but a few. Thought leadership stems from providing valuable educational content. However, the biggest SEO benefits come from contributorship.
Getting Started With Thought Leadership
Thought leadership opportunities are embraced and desired by the vast majority of brands out there.
And that proves two things:
- It’s worth the effort to gain ultimate thought leadership.
- There’s a lot of competition out there.
The truth is, everyone who owns a business would love to build thought leadership.
However, many people feel they don’t have ‘what it takes’ to be a thought leader. Their self-belief, confidence, and perhaps lack of experience can cause severe self-doubt. That’s the number one inhibitor: people stop themselves.
It’s a massive shame because if they hadn’t listened to their self-doubt, their businesses would have thrived.
There are plenty of opportunities available to business owners to start thought leadership. The main takeaway before we get into the ‘how’ is: don’t stop yourself.
Bridging Thought Leadership and SEO
The goal is to have your thought leadership pieces published on websites that have an audience demographic in line with yours. This means that if you appeared on five different websites, you have the opportunity of marketing yourself to five sets of audiences that could potentially become leads.
While they may all be the same target demographic, they’ll be formed out of different individuals, meaning you’ll gain a more significant rate of interest and be considered a trustworthy figure within your niche.
Your guest post should have a link to your own site. Despite it being you who wrote the post in the first place, the link points back to your website from a different domain, which counts towards link building.
Thought Leadership & SEO: Is it Worth It?
It takes time and effort but thought leadership is the most effective way to gain a widespread amount of leaders, become an authority within your industry, and boost your SEO.
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Related posts:
- How Thought Leadership Translates to SEO Success - June 1, 2021
