Discover expert strategies for building brand authority and standing out in your industry as a blogger, entrepreneur or business owner.
IE 433: Building Brand Authority: Strategies for Standing Out in Your Industry with Shaunda Necole
Shaunda Necole is the author of 100 Things to Do Before You Die. She has been a blogger, podcaster, and digital content creator for almost a decade. She has multiple blogs including Shaunda Necole, The Soul Food Pot, and Vegas Right Now.
What does “brand authority” mean to you, and why is it crucial for business success?
Brand authority is niching down and being an experienced expert with authoritativeness in your area of expertise (what your business does.
For example, Shaunda is an expert on southern soul food, not Italian or Mexican cuisine. She is an east coast girl from Virginia with southern roots and strives to be an expert in southern soul food.
There are so many ways we can be a brand expert in our area. By telling her origin story that includes her grandma Florence from North Carolina, who is a catering queen, gives more authoritativeness of how Shaunda can be an expert. Being from Virginia and showcasing her recipes helps with the expertise.
While she hasn’t lived in Las Vegas all of her life, she wants to have topical expertise in that field. To do that, she tells how she and her husband traveled to Las Vegas for two decades to find hidden gems and treasures that people may or may not already know about.
We can all be experts in our respective fields, which is why we chose to write or talk about them in the online space. You want to tell your story so viewers and listeners can know why to trust you in that field.
It also helps with Google finding you. It establishes a sense of authority that comes along with having done this for so long. Even if you don’t have degrees or letters behind your name, it is about the experience you have, how you have put effort into understanding it better, and can educate others about it.
Jenny often uses expert and educator interchangeably when she is talking about it to her audience. That gives people more confidence that they have been doing something for a long time and can educate others about their niche.
How can businesses leverage content marketing to build authority and credibility?
First, you have your own website, which is your own real estate and foundation. Shaunda encourages businesses to have a blog. It is an easy way to establish authoritativeness and to have people find you.
People go to Google to search. They have a question and they want to know or learn something. They have an inquisitive mindset. Having a blog about the thing that you’re an expert in is super helpful to be viewed as a trusted authority.
Then, you can sell a product or service to them because they trust in what you have already said. You have answered them and guided them.
As women, we side-step and don’t want to use the word expert but you can share some of the simplest things about what you know, that is helpful for others. Having a blog and being able to answer nuanced questions because you are an expert in your business helps build your brand.
Social media is rented property. You should not build your entire business there. You have to build it on your website.
You need to build it in coordination with your podcast or YouTube so you have that audio or video content that you can turn into a podcast on your website. You own it and can grow your email list to be able to offer products and services that you are going to create.
Being able to have people as part of your community and stay in communication with them is something you don’t get on social platforms.
What role does social proof, like testimonials and case studies, play in strengthening brand authority?
Google has gone through a shift in SEO recently. People feel like their page views are getting pulled out from under them. Google potentially is looking for testimonials, case studies, and comments to see that people are asking questions and engaging with your content.
It is helpful for everyone as content creators to read those comments and questions. They can be the catalyst to create new content. That type of engagement is gold and can tell you exactly where to go with your content and what to create next.
Google has a rating system for food recipes, for example. If you are getting more ratings, people might select your recipes over someone who has a lot less.
Since there are so many recipes, DIYs, and explanations of how to do things, Jenny goes to the comments first to see what kind of questions are being asked and if they are answered.
She wants to read the article and get the outcome/solution to her problem. If she sees that there are a ton of questions and no one answers them or they are confused, Jenny is going to the next thing to find her answers.
How important is personal branding for business leaders in building overall brand authority?
Shaunda doesn’t feel like it is the first thing but it is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT) that are the core things. People don’t know your brand when they go to search. When they land on your site, they are looking for answers to the problems they are trying to solve.
Google does change but it stays the same. Google has a customer that is searching and they want to make sure they are delivering the best content to the customer. It is our job as creators to make sure we are putting our best foot forward and using the structure of EEAT to give the best answer and solution to the reader.
Brand is secondary to that. You want to make sure you are the most helpful with the most experienced advice. If you have pictures to explain, bullets with structured data, and anything that you can use to make it an easier read, and to be the most helpful to the customer to answer their questions.
You can use your voice of authority to hook the audience to see you as the authority.
What role does SEO and thought leadership play in establishing online authority?
SEO is looking at the structure of what you want to present in thought leadership. You need to demonstrate that to Google. Format it in the love language of Google so it understands who you are.
One of the things you can do to establish your thought leadership, your role, who you are, and why you are the one to talk about this thing, is to share it in your bio. You want to share it with your readers but it also speaks to Google and shows that you are not just AI or a bot that someone put together to create content.
Your bio tells a story. Share things that your readers would love to know more about you. It makes you a credible thought leader in the SEO sphere.
Not only are the articles good but Google starts to view you as the expert and ranks your content because you have SEO topical authority.
It might see pictures of you doing these things and explaining your experience and expertise. It establishes your authority and shows what you want to be known for. It might be your content pillars or a framework of what you offer based on specific principles that you are trying to teach.
The “about section” is critical and something you want to pay attention to. You can make it concise and then use that same exact thing for all of your different social media platforms so the story is succinct as to who you are as the expert and you are not confusing Google because you have different descriptions on different platforms. Make a bite-sized version that matches your about section.
How can a brand sustain its authority and avoid becoming stagnant as industries evolve?
There are always content updates. We get in trouble because we think it is a “one-and-done.” You need to constantly check your top posts to make sure that they are still relevant to Google.
Google makes changes constantly and it is good to do a health check on your top performing content, and update the things that need to be changed. You want to make sure you are covering all ground, using EEAT, and being helpful to your readers.
For some reason, content creators feel like they have to push out new content and forget about the great gems we already have. We can go back and make a few quick tweaks, rework, or redesign to make it fit as we change too. The top 10-20 bring in your revenue and you want to make sure those are still relevant.
100 Things To Do in Las Vegas Before you Die
100 Things To Do in Las Vegas Before you Die is about all of the wonderful things to see in Las Vegas when you visit. Discover why so many people keep coming here year after year. Up and down the famous Vegas Strip and beyond, this diversity, vibrancy, and curiosity make Las Vegas a city ready to be reveled in, experienced, and explored.
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