If you are a small business owner trying to rank in your space, you may not spend much time thinking about what Google thinks of you. It is becoming increasingly important, however, as Google adjusts its algorithm more and more towards E-A-T or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. The author that is providing your information on your site, often the business owner themselves, or a writer working with the owner, has more and more weight on whether your pages should rank. I talked about the importance of Google understanding entities and how they relate to one another years ago. Now it has even become important how they understand you as an entity and whether you have authority and trust in your topic areas. The good news is you can grow that over time by writing more and more content around your expertise, but the way Google views you as an author is becoming increasingly important to how you and your site are going to rank for relevant topics.
Understanding Entity Relationships
I just spend 4 out of 6 workdays at two different search conferences and one of the biggest things that stand out is understanding entity relationships. There are many new and expensive tools out there now to break down subject areas and help content creators write better supporting content to not only address what users are searching for but also build more authority in the subject area. Though there may not be a lot of great paid tools out there that fit into the typical small business budget, you can get some ideas from some free tools that I have written about before like Entity Explorer and SEO Minion.
Build Your Own Authority in Your Area of Expertise
It is important to connect your content to you as an author and to build that authority. Your About page and author profiles are becoming more important. Make sure you put in all of the reasons you should be trusted in your area of expertise. Pop back in and check out what your profile says about you. Chances are you haven’t looked at it in years and it may need some updates. Take a look at your own name in Entity Explorer and see what the web thinks about you. If you have a generic name, you may have a lot of work to do. If your areas of expertise aren’t popping up, you may want to make sure to write more about them.
For example, with mine, I need to write more about Google Ads and PPC. There is some other info that pops in there that is related to other Jeremy Skillings’ that are out there as well.
Become an Authority
So it goes beyond just Googling your name to see what comes up. Now you need to understand your name as an entity, as well as your business name if it is unique. You can spend some time in 2022 getting more authority and trust for you and your site in your topic area. Content has always been king in SEO and now the writer of the content matters more than ever. Make sure you are an authority in your world.
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