SEO Strategies for Thought Leadership

When we think about Thought Leaders, people that spring to mind are influential experts like Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and Simon Sinek. Why are these the first names that come to mind? It’s because they’ve established themselves over the years as the go-to source for industry-relevant information. In this blog, we’ll go through some of the most effective SEO Strategies for Thought Leadership.

Getting to that level, though, takes a great deal of search-optimized, quality content and consistently distributing it through a variety of channels. These channels will ultimately lead to a healthy content marketing strategy and include blog posts, long-form SEO-optimized blogs, social content, and email marketing. At the end of the day, you really want to focus on growing your qualified organic traffic, and that means honing your SEO strategy.

How do you get started building a smart SEO content marketing strategy? Start by learning about how to write SEO-friendly blogs — Yoast, a plug-in we use here at Article Writing Co, breaks it down for you. We also connected with Brian Dean, CEO of Backlinko, whose email marketing strategies and content surrounding SEO garnered him a seat as a thought leader. We asked Dean how he thinks thought leadership fits into an overall SEO strategy, to which he replied: “Being a thought leader indirectly helps with SEO in a few ways. First, it can land you more link opportunities (like podcast interviews, guest posts, speaking gigs, etc.). Secondly, it makes you and your brand more recognizable, which can boost your organic click-through rate.”

So what are the top SEO tactics to consider if you want to grow your brand as a thought leader? We’ve broken it down into the 3 most important strategies you should be implementing.

Create Backlinks

Backlinks or link building is the process of obtaining hyperlinks that direct people back to your website. Google views backlinks as an endorsement of your business and gives your site legitimacy. If you’re looking to impact your business in a substantial way, link building has its advantages.

A strong backlink strategy can improve traffic flow and site ranking to create a referral business network. When you’re in the process of building your links, it requires you to reach out to other businesses, resulting in forming relationships. When I start contacting individuals at companies about linking back to our site, we end up talking about the services we offer at Article Writing Co and that creates business opportunities for us. It’s a soft engagement strategy that works wonders!

An effective link-building strategy also helps promote your brand. It shows that you are the thought leader in your field through links to appropriate content. Neil Patel does a stellar job explaining how to use SEO to build your brand on his blog. Patel explains that “If you want to build strong brand recognition using the inbound methodology, you need to work on your SEO, content marketing, networking, social networks, and other such things.”

Keyword Research

To understand what search terms you need to rank for, you must engage in keyword research. What are the thought leaders in your industry ranking for, and which keywords you should focus on?

Most times, keywords aren’t simply individual words. They are full sentences or groups of words that combine to properly describe your product or service. You also need to be careful here, as the over-use of keywords will make your content come off forced and may even lead to Google penalizing your site in their rankings. 

We wrote a great article all about keywords and how to optimize them to your benefit. 

Optimizing your Content

While keywords are an important part of your SEO, a rich content strategy is even more critical to the success of how Google ranks your site. This is the ideal situation for emerging Thought Leaders as the focus is on covering a specific topic. 

This is where topic modeling comes into play. Topic modeling is a framework where the Google algorithm measures the topical comprehension of your page and measures it to a search query. 

Here, content optimization focuses on finding the best answers to a search query with comprehensive content. As a thought leader, this is your chance to shine and focus on a niche topic of choice. The narrower your focus, the better your chances of being picked up by search engines.

Ready to Invest in Your SEO Strategies for Thought Leadership?

At Article-Writing.co, we understand that you have a lot on your plate. Let us share your voice on your behalf, so you don’t need to add more time to your busy schedule to write your own content marketing. We’ll expand your audience and grow your business. Our strategists and creators will develop a plan to create engaging materials to represent your Thought Leader brand through your own specialized Thought Leadership Package. 

Let us help you strengthen and broaden your consumer base for continued professional success. Book a call today.