What is Content Authority?

Content authority in the context of content marketing refers to the act of consistently creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and trustworthy information and stories. This is done to gain attention, engage, and influence a clearly defined audience to identify who would benefit from your products and services.

The concept hinges on establishing oneself as a reliable and knowledgeable source in a specific field or about a particular topic, enhancing the brand’s credibility and trustworthiness. Content authority is achieved through passion and practice in curating high-quality content that is useful and relevant to your target audience.

This involves researching your topic well, presenting well-curated content, and potentially referencing authoritative web resources. As we work to develop a client’s content authority, we centralize the approach in a pre-planned content library. This approach helps ensure that visitors recognize your content’s quality and are more likely to share it, increasing traffic to your site and improving visibility on search engines and social media.

Background on Content Authority

The challenge we continue to find with our clients is that there always seems to be a lack of strategy as they deploy their content marketing. Building authority with content requires a strategy; however, most businesses have no documented content marketing strategy and are likely to never maximize their return on investment (ROI) with content. When SEMrush did a study on content marketing strategies, they asked content marketers:

Both pre-requisites and post-analysis need to happen with your content marketing strategy. The evolution:

Brand – Companies need an established culture and identity that resonates with their target audience.

Messaging – Companies need to research and understand their audience and how to communicate with them, distinguishing themselves from their competitors.

Content – Companies need to develop content that provides the answers that prospects and customers are researching online, providing value and building trust to lead them to engage with your company. This needs to be accomplished across mediums. This requires in-depth SEO analysis of search queries, search trends, and competitive analysis.

Promotion – As companies identify high-performing content, that content needs to be promoted to reach and acquire new audiences. It’s not just paid search (PPC) but paid social and public relations outreach that maximizes shared, earned, and paid media.

Analysis – Comprehensive analysis to identify what performs, where it performs, and the gaps to develop more content needs accomplished. The analysis may prove that you must modify your brand, re-develop your unique value proposition (UVP), or adjust your overall messaging and content.

Customers often expect us to jump directly to developing content even though they lack a strong brand identity or don’t understand who they’re writing to or how they consume the content. And at other times, we see a massive investment in content development without a strategy to promote that content.

If there are weaknesses in the preceding or post-production strategies with your content marketing, you can not fully realize the impact potential of the content you’re developing.

How is Content Produced to Develop Authority?

Content authority is an established methodology where research doesn’t simply provide what to write to fulfill the demand for content about your products and services online; it’s the methodology to increase the effectiveness of that content over time. With an effective content authority process in place, your content will increase its visibility in search engines, social media, external relevant sites, and your own.

Content Authority brings an agile marketing approach to your content production and implementation. Content is purposeful and measured to continue to build authority. It’s not just about pushing content frequently; it’s about continuously optimizing your content library, republishing, and refreshing applicable content to sustain or improve your overall authority.

What are the Metrics of Content Authority?

Because you’re observing every aspect of your brand, messaging, and content, metrics include every element to monitor performance through customer acquisition, retention, and upselling. One very simple way to view your content authority is by doing a competitive analysis with SEMrush with your peers for a non-branded keyword phrase that drives the most relevant customers to your site. You can even break it down further by overlapping, associated keywords.

For B2C and B2B content marketers, you should analyze your target audience and understand the information they seek online. That goes beyond your products and services.

B2C Content Marketing – If you’re selling pots and pans, you’re likely to find that your target audience is seeking great recipes online.

B2B Content Marketing – If you’re selling a CRM, you’re likely to find that your target audience is seeking assistance with sales techniques, leadership, and analysis.

Building authority isn’t simply about your product or services, it’s about how your target audience can successfully utilize your products and services in their daily lives… either at home or in the office.

Customer journeys (not just one) should be illustrated over time as every attribute of your content and the customer’s interaction with it is captured and monitored – including KPIs associated with awareness, recognition, sentiment, views, ranking, conversions, interactions, impressions, clicks, completions, shares, etc.

What are the Results of a Content Authority Strategy?

Here’s a simple example of how content authority drives content marketing results for clients utilizing a relevant keyword strategy for a client. Search engine ranking is a pertinent indicator of a client’s content authority because rank is a combination of the content and its overall popularity online, as measured by relevant links back to it from quality websites.

Below is an overview of the client’s content and the aggregate ranking of that client month to month for the last few years. Note that overall, they’re ranking on the bottom of page 1 at best.

Here’s the content that we produced, shared, and promoted. With an average SERP ranking of 3rd or 4th, this content strategy’s value overshadows any content the client had previously produced. The click-through rate (CTR) on those positions is exponentially higher than the rest of the results.

Content Authority was brought to our team by Bryant Tutterow, who has implemented and refined several companies’ strategies. The results are very much like compounding interest.

By focusing across the spectrum of communication mediums, content types, and audience locations and driving and promoting and optimizing a concerted effort, we’ve been able to grow ranking and reach of our clients up to 940%. This continues to drive retention, upsell, acquisition, and awareness for the brands we serve.

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Originally Published on Martech Zone: What is Content Authority?