SEO

What It Is And How To Use It

Published

2 years ago

August 10, 2022

Every brand wants to be considered a thought leader, but fewer can define what actually qualifies as thought leadership.

When done correctly, thought leadership marketing can help your business maintain authority in your industry.

But it is an earned strategy.

Your content marketing teams should only pursue thought leadership if your brand has the successes, perspectives, reputation, and innovations to back up your claims.

If your brand has earned your industry’s trust, then here is how to get started with this specific type of content.

What Is Thought Leadership?

When a brand or individual is considered a thought leader, others in the same industry consistently look to them for insights.

Thought leadership content may include research, opinions, personal anecdotes, or future predictions.

It may reference current events, evaluate industry trends, or spark debate among other thought leaders.

It can also take on many forms, including:

Ebooks.
White Papers.
Infographics.
Webinars.
Podcasts.
Op-eds.
Original Research.
And more!

The reality is that most content on the internet is quite repetitive and doesn’t showcase original thoughts.

So, what distinguishes thought leadership content?

Brand-specific insights that shape the larger conversations happening in your industry.

When Should I Get Started With Thought Leadership Content?

New businesses or brands will not be ready to pursue this type of content marketing.

Why? Because others in your industry are less likely to trust your insight if a depth of experience doesn’t back it.

Successful thought leadership does require a strong foundation in content marketing.

It also requires public relations, social media, and reputation management.

If your brand is actively engaging in the above efforts, you’re paving your way for a future as a thought leader.

Benefits Of Thought Leadership Content

Like all content marketing, creating high-quality thought leadership takes time and resources.

So, what are the benefits?

Earns Customer Loyalty

Thought leaders have already done the work of building credibility in their industry.

Because they have earned customers’ trust, they can use their thought leadership to gain customer loyalty.

In one Edelman and LinkedIn survey, almost 60% of respondents claimed that they found a brand’s thought leadership content more trustworthy than their traditional marketing materials.

And, thought leadership content doesn’t only influence customers.

It helps competitors, journalists, influencers – or anyone who has an interest in your space – see your brand as an authoritative industry voice.

Brings SEO Value

Thought leadership content that lives permanently on your website can rank for relevant keywords and drive organic traffic.

Off-site thought leadership content that includes backlinks to your website, whether in the author byline or within the content, sends link equity to your web pages, improving your Domain Authority and your overall ranking potential.

Unlike traditional guest posting, thought leadership can help you acquire backlinks from authoritative domains that are otherwise somewhat difficult to acquire.

Lead Generation

For B2B brands, in particular, thought leadership can help secure qualified leads.

Most B2B customers are highly knowledgeable in their fields. Many engage with thought leadership regularly to stay abreast of industry trends and innovations.

If they discover that your brand is the source of thought leadership, they are more likely to pursue you as their service provider or solution.

How To Develop A Thought Leadership Marketing Strategy

Creating thought leadership is much different than simply contributing a guest post to an industry website or offering how-to blogs on your own domain.

Thought leaders leverage their vast expertise and knowledge to bring their audience exceptional value that no one else can.

Identify Your Areas Of Expertise

When developing your thought leadership strategy, it’s important to consider what sets you apart from other thought leaders.

Think about the unique angles and perspectives that your brand can leverage:

Do you have a differentiated product or technology?
What do you do differently than other brands in your space?
Have you done original research or reporting on industry topics?
Have you found new solutions to well-known industry problems?
What challenges or setbacks has your brand overcome?

These are just a few questions to help you brainstorm, as many topics can be utilized for thought leadership.

Remember that your unique perspectives may not necessarily be limited to your products and services.

Your workplace culture, company mission or values, growth strategy, and more can all be leveraged to create impactful thought leadership.

Screenshot from Forbes.com taken by Author, August 2022

Choose Your Thought Leaders

The byline of your thought leadership content must be from an individual at your company with the knowledge, experience, and expertise to speak with authority.

That often means C-Suite executives, founders, directors, or key stakeholders at your organization or business.

Titles are important in the world of thought leadership.

Your audience should be confident that the speaker is intimately connected to the earned secrets of your brand.

Determine Where Your Thought Leadership Content Will Live

Thought leadership content can be valuable assets that live permanently on your website.

You may want to leverage this content in email marketing, lead generation, or other parts of the customer journey.

Like a guest posting strategy, you can pitch thought leadership to other publications featuring commentary from expert voices.

Screenshot from Expert Contributors Section of Builtin.com August 2022

To get started with off-site thought leadership, put together a list of publications that want to feature industry experts.

Image by author, August 2022

Then, reach out to the editors or content managers.

Ask if they are interested in publishing your brand’s original content.

Your outreach targets should have a higher Domain Authority score than your website and display strong SEO signals.

Create High-Quality Content

The most time-consuming part of any content marketing strategy is the time and effort to create high-quality content.

But unlike other content on your website, thought leadership must meet certain requirements to be categorized accordingly.

To create content that actually has the prestige and quality of thought leadership, you’ll need to meet the following standards.

Real World Examples

Because thought leadership is all about earned secrets, the support for your claims should be drawn from real-world experience.

Screenshot from ProductHunt.com Maker Stories, August 2022

Your audience should feel like it’s getting an inside look at your business and the strategies or approaches that made you successful.

Personable Expert Voices

Although your brand name can carry the weight of the byline, the best thought leadership content has a genuine, personable voice, name, and face behind it.

You want your audience to feel as though it’s getting personal access to key decision makers and stakeholders at your business or organization.

Short-Term And Long-Term Value

Thought leadership content should be actively engaging with the conversations that are happening right now in your industry.

But there should also be evergreen elements to your thought leadership content that help that content rank organically in search.

You want your marketing team to be able to leverage thought leadership content for more than just the week that other brands’ hot takes show up on social media.

The best thought leadership will have long-term value, giving your team evergreen content for future inbound marketing efforts.

Informed By Your Products Or Services

Ultimately, thought leadership is still a content marketing strategy, and you can use it to earn new leads and customers.

Still, the actual products or services your brand provides are what inform the best thought leadership.

That doesn’t mean a front-and-center sales pitch. Your products and services should have a more subtle presence and be seen as a key source of where your expertise comes from.

Promote Your Content And Thought Leaders

Building a thought leadership presence means creating content and sharing it on social media sites with the loyal audience your organization has worked so hard to earn.

Most thought leaders are active (and verified!) on websites like Twitter, where real-time conversations take place in response to industry happenings.

Journalists also look at thought leaders to provide insights or expert sourcing when reporting on industry news and love to cite content that can serve as strong evidence in their reporting.

You can use your thought leadership content to enhance your PR outreach, as journalists will prefer to feature prominent thought leaders over less reputable sources.

Conclusion

It will take time and proven success to reach the status of a thought leader.

But, once earned, thought leadership marketing has a fantastic way of enriching all other areas of your digital strategy.

Deploy this strategy consistently, and you’ll earn the loyalty of industry professionals who are always waiting to hear what your brand will say next.

More resources:

Featured Image: Andrii Zastrozhnov/Shutterstock

SEO

brightonSEO Live Blog

Published

4 hours ago

April 25, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Hello everyone. It’s April again, so I’m back in Brighton for another two days of ~~sun~~, sea, and SEO!

Being the introvert I am, my idea of fun isn’t hanging around our booth all day explaining we’ve run out of t-shirts (seriously, you need to be fast if you want swag!). So I decided to do something useful and live-blog the event instead.

Follow below for talk takeaways and (very) mildly humorous commentary.

SEO

Google Further Postpones Third-Party Cookie Deprecation In Chrome

Published

7 hours ago

April 25, 2024

Max

Close-up of a document with a grid and a red stamp that reads "delayed" over the word "status" due to Chrome's deprecation of third-party cookies.

Google has again delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser. The latest postponement comes after ongoing challenges in reconciling feedback from industry stakeholders and regulators.

The announcement was made in Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) joint quarterly report on the Privacy Sandbox initiative, scheduled for release on April 26.

Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Pushed To 2025

Google states it “will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4” this year as planned.

Instead, the tech giant aims to begin deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome “starting early next year,” assuming an agreement can be reached with the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The statement reads:

“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.”

Continued Engagement With Regulators

Google reiterated its commitment to “engaging closely with the CMA and ICO” throughout the process and hopes to conclude discussions this year.

This marks the third delay to Google’s plan to deprecate third-party cookies, initially aiming for a Q3 2023 phaseout before pushing it back to late 2024.

The postponements reflect the challenges in transitioning away from cross-site user tracking while balancing privacy and advertiser interests.

Transition Period & Impact

In January, Chrome began restricting third-party cookie access for 1% of users globally. This percentage was expected to gradually increase until 100% of users were covered by Q3 2024.

However, the latest delay gives websites and services more time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies through Google’s limited “deprecation trials” program.

The trials offer temporary cookie access extensions until December 27, 2024, for non-advertising use cases that can demonstrate direct user impact and functional breakage.

While easing the transition, the trials have strict eligibility rules. Advertising-related services are ineligible, and origins matching known ad-related domains are rejected.

Google states the program aims to address functional issues rather than relieve general data collection inconveniences.

Publisher & Advertiser Implications

The repeated delays highlight the potential disruption for digital publishers and advertisers relying on third-party cookie tracking.

Industry groups have raised concerns that restricting cross-site tracking could push websites toward more opaque privacy-invasive practices.

However, privacy advocates view the phaseout as crucial in preventing covert user profiling across the web.

With the latest postponement, all parties have more time to prepare for the eventual loss of third-party cookies and adopt Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox APIs as replacements.

Featured Image: Novikov Aleksey/Shutterstock

SEO

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

Published

1 day ago

April 24, 2024

Max

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

ChatGPT is a game changer in the field of SEO. This powerful language model can generate human-like content, making it an invaluable tool for SEO professionals.

However, the prompts you provide largely determine the quality of the output.

To unlock the full potential of ChatGPT and create content that resonates with your audience and search engines, writing effective prompts is crucial.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the art of writing prompts for ChatGPT, covering everything from basic techniques to advanced strategies for layering prompts and generating high-quality, SEO-friendly content.

Writing Prompts For ChatGPT

What Is A ChatGPT Prompt?

A ChatGPT prompt is an instruction or discussion topic a user provides for the ChatGPT AI model to respond to.

The prompt can be a question, statement, or any other stimulus to spark creativity, reflection, or engagement.

Users can use the prompt to generate ideas, share their thoughts, or start a conversation.

ChatGPT prompts are designed to be open-ended and can be customized based on the user’s preferences and interests.

How To Write Prompts For ChatGPT

Start by giving ChatGPT a writing prompt, such as, “Write a short story about a person who discovers they have a superpower.”

ChatGPT will then generate a response based on your prompt. Depending on the prompt’s complexity and the level of detail you requested, the answer may be a few sentences or several paragraphs long.

Use the ChatGPT-generated response as a starting point for your writing. You can take the ideas and concepts presented in the answer and expand upon them, adding your own unique spin to the story.

If you want to generate additional ideas, try asking ChatGPT follow-up questions related to your original prompt.

For example, you could ask, “What challenges might the person face in exploring their newfound superpower?” Or, “How might the person’s relationships with others be affected by their superpower?”

Remember that ChatGPT’s answers are generated by artificial intelligence and may not always be perfect or exactly what you want.

However, they can still be a great source of inspiration and help you start writing.

Must-Have GPTs Assistant

I recommend installing the WebBrowser Assistant created by the OpenAI Team. This tool allows you to add relevant Bing results to your ChatGPT prompts.

This assistant adds the first web results to your ChatGPT prompts for more accurate and up-to-date conversations.

It is very easy to install in only two clicks. (Click on Start Chat.)

Screenshot from ChatGPT, April 2024

For example, if I ask, “Who is Vincent Terrasi?,” ChatGPT has no answer.

With WebBrower Assistant, the assistant creates a new prompt with the first Bing results, and now ChatGPT knows who Vincent Terrasi is.

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

You can test other GPT assistants available in the GPTs search engine if you want to use Google results.

Master Reverse Prompt Engineering

ChatGPT can be an excellent tool for reverse engineering prompts because it generates natural and engaging responses to any given input.

By analyzing the prompts generated by ChatGPT, it is possible to gain insight into the model’s underlying thought processes and decision-making strategies.

One key benefit of using ChatGPT to reverse engineer prompts is that the model is highly transparent in its decision-making.

This means that the reasoning and logic behind each response can be traced, making it easier to understand how the model arrives at its conclusions.

Once you’ve done this a few times for different types of content, you’ll gain insight into crafting more effective prompts.

Prepare Your ChatGPT For Generating Prompts

First, activate the reverse prompt engineering.

Type the following prompt: “Enable Reverse Prompt Engineering? By Reverse Prompt Engineering I mean creating a prompt from a given text.”

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

ChatGPT is now ready to generate your prompt. You can test the product description in a new chatbot session and evaluate the generated prompt.

Type: “Create a very technical reverse prompt engineering template for a product description about iPhone 11.”

Reverse Prompt engineering via WebChatGPT

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

The result is amazing. You can test with a full text that you want to reproduce. Here is an example of a prompt for selling a Kindle on Amazon.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {product), capture the writing style and the length of the text :
product =”

Reverse prompt engineering: Amazon product

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

I tested it on an SEJ blog post. Enjoy the analysis – it is excellent.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {text}, capture the tone and writing style of the {text} to include in the prompt :
text = all text coming from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bard-training-data/478941/”

Reverse prompt engineering an SEJ blog post

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

But be careful not to use ChatGPT to generate your texts. It is just a personal assistant.

Go Deeper

Prompts and examples for SEO:

Keyword research and content ideas prompt: “Provide a list of 20 long-tail keyword ideas related to ‘local SEO strategies’ along with brief content topic descriptions for each keyword.”
Optimizing content for featured snippets prompt: “Write a 40-50 word paragraph optimized for the query ‘what is the featured snippet in Google search’ that could potentially earn the featured snippet.”
Creating meta descriptions prompt: “Draft a compelling meta description for the following blog post title: ’10 Technical SEO Factors You Can’t Ignore in 2024′.”

Important Considerations:

Always Fact-Check: While ChatGPT can be a helpful tool, it’s crucial to remember that it may generate inaccurate or fabricated information. Always verify any facts, statistics, or quotes generated by ChatGPT before incorporating them into your content.
Maintain Control and Creativity: Use ChatGPT as a tool to assist your writing, not replace it. Don’t rely on it to do your thinking or create content from scratch. Your unique perspective and creativity are essential for producing high-quality, engaging content.
Iteration is Key: Refine and revise the outputs generated by ChatGPT to ensure they align with your voice, style, and intended message.

Additional Prompts for Rewording and SEO:
– Rewrite this sentence to be more concise and impactful.
– Suggest alternative phrasing for this section to improve clarity.
– Identify opportunities to incorporate relevant internal and external links.
– Analyze the keyword density and suggest improvements for better SEO.

Remember, while ChatGPT can be a valuable tool, it’s essential to use it responsibly and maintain control over your content creation process.

Experiment And Refine Your Prompting Techniques

Writing effective prompts for ChatGPT is an essential skill for any SEO professional who wants to harness the power of AI-generated content.

Hopefully, the insights and examples shared in this article can inspire you and help guide you to crafting stronger prompts that yield high-quality content.

Remember to experiment with layering prompts, iterating on the output, and continually refining your prompting techniques.

This will help you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing world of SEO.

More resources:

Featured Image: Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock