Validating Your Expertise

Today I’m talking about validating expertise.

You might be the best ___(insert your expertise)___ in the world.

But if search engines don’t have validation of that you won’t be visible when people are searching for a topic that you claim to be an expert in.

Google and other search engines see any entity (person or organization) as an authority when they find that a website has:

• Relevance
  Well-organized and helpful information on a website page that matches or closely matches the searchers’ intention.
• Recency
  Recent updates and/or newly published information on your topic as proof that you’re actively participating in what makes you an expert.
• Coverage
  A lot of information on a topic is well-organized and navigable. Search engines want to refer searchers to the “encyclopedia” on any given topic and encyclopedias have an index, glossary, etc.
• Credibility
  A lot of other experts or credible entities are referring to you (via links to your site) as an expert; either explicitly or implicitly confirming your expertise.

Not only do people use search engines and company websites to discover something new, but they use them to validate authority and expertise.

By positioning your website as an authority in search engines, you do the same for those that visit your website through other channels.

Here’s an example:

1. Someone hears about you from a friend, from a billboard, radio, or anything other than a search engine.
2. That person searches for you by name in a search engine.
3. They visit your site and start the validation process.

Validation happens via a lot of internal questioning, a lot of which is subconscious to each of us when we are visiting a website:

• Can I trust this company?
• Is this company fully helping me understand how they could help me?
• Do other people trust them?
• How put together are they?
• Why does this website not help me?

A good website communicates and validates expertise. Never stop working to prove that you are the expert.