28 Mar This is How to Build Authority Websites With WordPress in 2021

It seems like bloggers are a dime a dozen these days. Statista estimates that there will be about 31.7 million bloggers by 2020. But how many of those will have authority websites? An authority website is a proven business model, and it’s easy to set up with WordPress.

What is an Authority Website?

An authority site offers high-quality content about a particular subject or niche. Think of it as an information hub. It’s the kind of website that you’re excited to find when you’re doing research on a topic.

Authority sites need to house plenty of content. Much of that will be deliverable as articles or blog posts. You can also link out to or embed videos, audio and images to present the information.

You can build an authority site fairly quickly using WordPress. These sites don’t have to be complicated. They just need to be informative. When you impress visitors with your content, they’ll come back for more and share it with others.

There are some practices that can help you stand out when setting up your authority website. These include:

• Focusing on a specific niche
• Having a clearly defined goal or answering a specific question with your content
• Understanding your target audience
• Building a trustworthy site
• Creating a site that ranks highly in the search engines
• Monetizing your site

Choose a Topic

There are several beginners out there that need help. The first place that people go when they have a question is to a search engine.

When you’re choosing a topic for your authority site, you should consider what people are searching for. About 80 percent of internet users have searched for a health topic online.

You might think that choosing a popular niche is the way to go because you’ll have a target market that’s ready and willing to hear from you. People love food blogs, and internet audiences will often shell out money to lose weight. If you get into one of these niches, though, you’ll have a great deal of competition.

When you’re coming up with a topic, think about what you want to help people with. Consider your own area of expertise. If you know a lot about a subject, you’ll be able to keep churning out content ideas.

However, you don’t have to be the expert. You can recruit others to write for your site. Paying freelancers is one way to populate your site with content.

Allowing guest posts can help you generate blog posts for free. This is also a great way to market your authority website. Guest posters will usually share the articles that they’ve written, promoting you to their audiences and helping you expand your reach.

If you’re still brainstorming niches for your authority website, write down your top five passions, interests or hobbies. Use them as a springboard for your ideas.

Develop a Consistent Brand

Keep your brand identity in mind when you’re designing your website. If you deliver valuable content, you can become known as the expert in your niche. However, you must pay attention to the consistency of the entire package.

Internet audiences are often visual learners. They’ll spend some time reading your content, but they’ll also be influenced by the way that your website looks.

Start with a strong logo. If you don’t want to drain your budget, use a free logo maker to design it.

Make sure that you use high-quality images on your site too. If you don’t have a photographer’s eye, you can find plenty of free stock photos online and customize them using photo editing apps.

Build Your Site

If you’re a beginning blogger, you probably have questions about how to create a website from scratch. WordPress is one of the most popular platforms because it has a wide variety of options and is easy to use.

You can build a simple website affordably with WordPress.com, but most experts agree that it’s not the best way to go if you’re planning to profit from your authority website. WordPress.org gives you more control over your website. You’ll need to purchase your domain and hosting package separately, but installing WordPress on your site is free.

Design Your Site

An authority website doesn’t have to be fancy. It does, however, need to look professional and be easy to navigate.

Sketchy websites don’t exude authority. In fact, people might shy away from a low-quality site for fear of getting a virus. Your site doesn’t have to be complex to

Although your site doesn’t have to be complex, it should be clean and free of errors. Google will weed out low-quality websites, and you won’t have a chance to rank highly for your keywords.

The best way to design a good-looking site is to use a high-quality theme. WordPress themes are the templates that you’ll use to set up your website. They can be customized as much as you’d like.

You should choose a straightforward theme that’s easy to tailor with your images and text. Here are some factors to consider when you’re selecting a WordPress theme.

Populate Your Content

Filling your website with content doesn’t happen overnight. Writing with keywords in mind is critical for search engine optimization, or SEO. When you know what people are searching for with the right keyword research tools, you’ll be able to craft your content surrounding those queries.

You should use a few different formats to create your content. These might include:

• Tutorials
• Blog posts
• Resources pages
• Reviews
• Product round-ups
• Lists

When developing your content, think about whether you would want to share it. When it goes viral, you’ll be thankful that you made it so compelling.

Many people wonder how much content they should have when they launch their site. When considering search engine rankings, this doesn’t really matter. Google ranks individual pages. Therefore, make sure that each post is well crafted and has great SEO.

Your readers aren’t robots, though. You need to make sure that your authority website will keep your followers interested. Include enough content to draw your target audience in and keep them on your website. Linking to other pages within your site could prevent them from clicking off.

Your job isn’t over after you publish your authority website. Once you have built the foundation, you can spend time getting viewers and improving the site. Posting regularly and developing effective marketing and SEO strategies can help you gain some momentum.

Are you thinking about launching an authority website? Comment with your most pressing questions so that you can get some support.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle Deery is a freelance conversion copywriter for Heroic Search, a link building agency in Tulsa. She works with brands on product launches, social media marketing and optimizing their funnel at every stage. You can find her on Twitter.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-deery-ba7131123/
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/michwriting

Gravatar: michelle@heroicsearch.com