There are several different types of content. Keyword articles, for example, are articles that are primarily used in article marketing and placed in directories to boost your immediate and long term SEO. Content articles are generally added to your website. Blog posts are blog posts, etc.
Each and every type of content is designed to improve where you appear in search engines, inform potential customers, and hopefully lead to a purchase. Sometimes they talk about ferrets.
Content may be the most valuable tool for building your website, but it’s also slow, and you need multiple articles in order to even begin drawing interest from search engine spiders. Yet there is one type of content that, while more of a gamble, has the potential to really help your website take off: Authority Articles.
What Are Authority Articles?
Authority articles are articles that are very, very long, and generally written about a single topic. An example of an authority article would be “31 ways to save money on gas” or “101 ingredients that should be in your kitchen.” While most content is roughly 500 words on average, authority articles tend to be more than 3000 at minimum, and many reach as high as 5000 or more before they’re completed.
Authority articles are rarely used, but are highly coveted by Internet marketers. That’s because authority articles get a LOT of unprompted incoming links. Other websites love to link to long content that is informative for their readers, and authority articles provide that. Also, when a search engine decides that an authority article is useful, it’s not uncommon for the article to rank very high in search engines. One of the earliest authority articles we ever wrote (not about ferrets) received over 125,000 hits, and that article was never actively marketed.
Why Don’t More Companies Use Authority Articles?
So, if authority articles are so amazing and provide such incredible results, why aren’t more businesses using them? Here are a few possible reasons:
- Coming Up With a Topic – You can’t have an authority article written without a valid topic. For example “101 Reasons to Buy a Used Geo Metro” is impossible to write. At most you can come up with 3 or 4 reasons, and so an authority article becomes impossible. Of course, you are an expert in your field, so it should be possible to find a topic important to your readers for which you have a wealth of knowledge.
- No Guarantee – If you have the choice between investing in one authority article or 20 regular articles, an authority article is a bigger gamble. Those 20 articles are valuable in their own way and much less risky because they provide reliable, useful information. There’s no way to say with certainty that Google will value your authority article. If it does, the payoff is outstanding.
But despite these issues, authority articles can be immensely valuable. If you have the time to invest in writing one of these long articles, and you’ve accepted the risks associated with them, then you should absolutely add one or two to your website and see how it improves your search engine rank.
