Without question, website authority is pivotal in getting your website noticed. Having website authority means you’re not only a reputable business, but your site provides thorough information for potential clients, you are trusted by industry experts, and most importantly—are trusted by popular search engines.
When you’re a small business just beginning your online presence, 90 days may seem like a rapid timeline to build up your website authority. But every one of those 90 days counts. The internet is how the world finds small businesses these days, by checking search engines and comparing websites. The longer your website goes without being on the first page of relevant searches, the longer you lose potential customers to your competition.
But Google ranks pages, not websites, right? While that might be true, it’s still easier to rank your pages with more importance when they come from a high authority website. The sooner you build your small business’s website authority, the better. Fortunately, it is possible to have a high authority website within 90 days.
Understand how website authority is calculated
Website authority uses a scale between 1 and 100 to determine how likely your website is to be ranked highly on search engines. The closer you are to 100, the stronger your website authority. Businesses use online tools to measure website authority.
Knowing what’s important to your website authority will help you to boost it. Search engine traffic, backlink profiles, and other website traffic all play a role.
How to boost your website authority
There are steps you can take on your own, in collaboration, or with the help of others to boost your website authority.
Self-promotion
Let’s say in addition to owning and managing your own business, you’re also a pretty decent blogger and you write regular posts on your website. Content is great, but if no one sees your content and it doesn’t drive traffic to your website, you’re really just wasting valuable time. You need to make sure the content isn’t just written, but also seen.
The first and easiest thing you can do is to promote your content on social media. You should have an active social media presence in which you’ve connected with a number of people both within and without your industry.
When you post a new blog, set up a new webpage, or offer a new service, you should promote it across all of your social media platforms. The more you are engaging customers on social media, the more likely you are to get traffic to your website. It goes deeper than that, however. When you share content on social media, you stand a better chance of someone reading that content and sharing it with others. When someone else shares your content, that’s a link for your overall link profile.
In order to stand the best chance of adding to your link profile and boosting your website authority, you’ll need to share the content multiple times. At the same time, however, you want to avoid spamming. Many social media platforms have rules and algorithms to penalize what seems to be spam, just posting the same thing over and over. Even when they don’t, human readers don’t like to see the same post over and over—it just looks tacky.
You can work around this by presenting the content in creative ways, maybe creating a few different images or even a video to promote the same blog post. You can also get better results by posting at the best time for that post to be seen. The optimum time often depends on your audience and even the social media platform you use. You can use analytics charts to figure out the best scheduling time.
Outreach
You can also promote your website by getting on the right resource lists and directories. Search relevant keywords for your business until you find an established, industry-specific list. Moderated lists are even better for your website authority. Some website owners make the mistake of believing the more lists they’re on, the better. However, this is another instance when overkill might hurt you more than not posting at all. Reaching out to a few high authority lists will always be smarter for your website in the long run.
When you hear peers talk about boosting their website authority, someone will inevitably mention influencers. Influencers are a great way to introduce your content to an audience you’re not reaching, and influencer links look great when your website authority is ranked. In order to find the right influencers, you want to find someone in your industry or an adjacent industry. Let’s say you specialize in accounting for freelancers and artists. You might find a prominent freelancer as an influencer.
There are multiple ways you can seek out influencer involvement in your content. In some cases, you could reach out to an influencer to work out a contract in which the influencer is incentivized to promote their content. This can be difficult to achieve, as it takes quite a bit of time from the influencer. Another way to get influencers is through an “expert roundup” post. You can reach out to these influencers for their opinions and include them in your post, or even find something they wrote on that topic in the past and ask for permission to quote them.
Once the content is finished, you can tag them on social media. All that’s left for the influencer is to share the content.
If you want a regular relationship with an influencer, don’t pitch them as soon as you follow them on social media. Build up a connection. Check out their content, like their new posts, and start a conversation when you can. No one likes to feel used, but through forming genuine connections, you’re more likely to develop high quality influencer relationships.
Collaboration
Guest posting takes it a step further than influencers. In order to guest post, you find a blog or website in your niche and reach out to submit a post. Typically, these blogs take exception to blog posts that are clearly promotional, but they will allow you to link to your website in your bio or include relevant links. For instance, if you’ve written on this subject before, you can link to it in the post for elaboration. It all depends on their individual rules. In submitting this post, you open your website up to the host website’s loyal audience, possibly forming an overlap.
You can also invite bloggers to write a guest post on your blog, or you can even collaborate on a two part series, each posting your own half on your website and linking to the other’s post. While this does require more time and active involvement from your collaborator, it also offers benefits to both sides.
This isn’t limited to blog posts. Reach out to podcasts or youtube channels and ask if you can be a guest in an episode or two. Just make sure—whether it’s a blog, vlog, or podcast—that you do your research before reaching out. If you haven’t researched the topics they cover and how they like to cover those topics, it will be obvious, not to mention insulting. Much like websites, podcasters and vloggers will be wary if it’s obvious that you’re just plugging your website, but if you’ve written relevant content, you can easily work in, “I wrote a blog post about this called…” or “I talk about this on my website.” Most podcasters and vloggers will be happy to link to the posts you reference in their description.
Building your website authority in 90 days is a hustle, but one of the most important things to keep in mind is that quality will always trump quantity. In fact, if you find you have duplicate links or bad links on the internet, it’s probably best to remove those right away. Foster genuine relationships and search for high authority resources, and a high authority website is sure to follow.
These views are made solely by the author.
