How Do I Build Authority On A New Website?

Traditionally people would often think authority = backlinks + time.

What’s emerging now, though, is more like authority = trust signals that stack and reinforce each other.

That absolutely can still mean backlinks and how long your website has been around.

But what search engines and LLMs are also looking for is:

Clearly demonstrated experience that is novel and easily understood.

That has never not been important for SEO. It’s just that now it’s basically the only path forward. I’ve talked about this in other posts, highlighting the need to avoid generalizations and theoretical statements.

A lot of websites I look at in the course of research and consulting have variations of these issues at play:

• The site’s material is short and focused at the expense of not really saying anything.
• The site shares so much information that it becomes disorganized.
• The team blogs, but the post topics are fairly random and don’t cover cores of knowledge with real depth.
• Advice given is superficial and same-y, without any real, tangible stories to ground them.

I always tell clients to think about recent jobs they’ve done, or interactions with customers. What were examples of a key question or problem that came in to play? How was it resolved? What are questions and misunderstandings in your industry that others don’t really explain?

There’s a reluctance some business owners feel about “giving too much away,” and that if a blog post is too helpful the reader will have no reason to call. Not only is the opposite pretty well proven to be true, but you simply won’t rank with thin, superficial material.

(Think an article about professional cleaning that lists “great first impression” as the main selling point.) 😑

Even if you can game it temporarily, it doesn’t last. And that’s because…

Authority is built with alignment and reinforcement.

I once worked with a bondsman who asked me, “How can I be the best on Google?”

My response was essentially, “We prove it.”

He seemed disappointed at first, like maybe he thought that was a non-answer. But the reality, I explained to him, is that there’s no faking real authority.

At its best, SEO is about helping Google to see how great a business is, and ranking it accordingly. SEO is weakest when viewed as tricking Google into ranking an unworthy website. I realize unworthy probably sounds harsh, but if you don’t adequately show up as someone who wants to share knowledge and help people, why should you rank?

Google has gotten so much more discerning about what real relevance looks like, what components are consistent with real local leadership, that it has a pretty good BS detector these days.

You can make this philosophy actionable by doing this:

Ask yourself what the most important thing you’re selling is. Maybe it’s related to a misconception in your industry, or a common challenge that no one else is really addressing fully.

Then ask yourself, if your site has a clear leader in your industry, especially about those things, what kinds of pages and blog posts would it probably have? What types of topics would it have to discuss, and what sorts of stories would be the most human and helpful for someone to read?

You can ratchet this in further with data, of course, but you don’t even need keyword research to do this. Don’t let it stop your brainstorming.

Once you have some clarity here, make yourself some lists of what that would look like. Can you group of some of those ideas? Industry folks call these “content clusters.” Doing this will clarify the sequence and priority of what you’ll write.

As you bulk out these clusters, it’ll be much more apparent to search engines what you’re knowledgeable about. Each cluster could make your site rank for a variety of queries, and the more thoroughly you cover topics in that cluster, the more that will be true. I’d recommend making a cluster of at least a half dozen pieces before jumping to something else. (Go deep; don’t water down your momentum.)

Doing this also allows you to…

Be deliberate with internal linking.

Internal links are anywhere you reference some subpage or blog within your site, linking someone from the page they’re on to somewhere else. Search engines pay attention to where and how you do this, and it gives signals about your expertise.

Here’s some general advice for your internal linking:

• The phrasing of your anchor text matters. (The words that are actually the link.) You don’t want it to sound hackneyed or try-hard like making “best SEO guy in town” the anchor text and then linking to your About page. But anchor text that is descriptive helps inform where you are sending the reader. That’s helpful for the reader to decide if they even want to click the link, but search engines also take this cue. It can be abused, and it can be well used.
• Try to vary your anchor text phrasing. Using the same phrases over and over again will begin to look spammy. If you’ve used an obvious name of a topic once or twice already, the next time you link to that source use phrasing that circles around a benefit or a specific scenario to link to it. That way it’s still contextually relevant, but distinct.
• Posts within a topic cluster should ideally link to each other at various points. Any given post does not need to link to every other post in a cluster, but it’s good to ferry that up. One post might link to a couple of the others. By the time you’ve done this will all of them, each one should have some references. You can also make some of those cluster pieces link back up to one of the major service pages on your site that they relate to. That will enforce that service in association with those topics.
• You can also use FAQ type content to build out these clusters. For instance, you could start with a service page that has an FAQ section. It could give brief answers to some of these questions, and then provide a “read more” link on each of them to a blog post that expands upon those answers in much greater detail. That gives people a quick answer on the Service page, and then greatly expands upon topics directly related to that service page throughout the site. The cumulative effect of that is powerful.

While in some ways internal links aren’t as powerful as backlinks (links from other websites pointed at yours), used strategically they still contribute to authority. The other big advantage with internal links is that you can control them, so you could spend an afternoon dialing that in for meaningful benefit. Backlinks are comparatively much more difficult to accrue, especially in legit ways.

If your website is currently one page…

Start here.

You’ll need to build out meaningful service pages and then launch into a cluster strategy discussed above to build some momentum. The only other way to resolve the limitations of one-pagers is with a lot of links.

This is all where I’d start as far as authority building goes. There are other SEO considerations that become part of this puzzle, but these are some of the biggest bang for the buck activities you can do early on.

If you’d like a more hands-on form a guidance for your SEO, let’s talk.