How To Harness the Power of Keywords in Thought Leadership

Becoming a published thought leader is exciting, but the work doesn’t stop there. You still need to get people to read your content. So, how do you do this? Many top-level executives have found this step of securing viewers to be a major challenge, but what they don’t realize is that the answer to their problem is right in front of their eyes – and the solution is simpler than we might expect: harness the power of keywords.

Who Dominates Google and Why?

Every second Google logs 99,000 searches, culminating in more than 8.5 billion searches per day. With these numbers, it is no wonder that an entire business has emerged out of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO marketers spend countless hours optimizing websites, blogs, and articles in hopes of getting their clients on the esteemed "Google Page 1" search result. But thought leaders often don’t have the luxury of spare hours to spend on SEO optimization, so it’s important to understand the core concepts and implement them into your articles.?

Google rewards pages and websites that follow their best practices, so the key to a first page Google result is following these practices, while also paying close attention to updates – Google frequently adjusts its algorithms, up to 500-600 times a year by some estimations.?

But such optimization is not out of reach: There are concrete steps you can take to work your way up and rank among these publications.?

• Define your keywords. Answer Socrates is a great tool to find keywords that might otherwise have been missed. It allows you to put in a single keyword or combination of keywords and the site will give you a list of what people are searching for in relation to that topic on Google.?
• When writing, you can use a combination of the keywords naturally in subheaders or the body, but the most important place for keywords to be is always in the title.??
• If you’ve written about the same subject in another article, link back to the first article, or even directly reference it. This will give the previous article an added boost on the search engine as it is on-topic and relevant.?
• Finally, sit back, TRACK the results, and get working on the next.

Become a Page 1 Thought Leader

Companies will spend billions to rank for certain keywords. These techniques can yield actionable and quick results to have you competing with the same real estate – for billions less. :)

By strategically securing a page 1 results on Google, your article views will be consistent and timeless – you will hold an influential thought leadership position.

––

Tom Popomaronis is Executive Vice President of Innovation at Massive Alliance, a global executive branding agency. Tom co-founded Massive's Executive Leadership Branding program – which transforms world-class executives into contributing authors at leading publications.

Interested in expanding your own thought leadership footprint? Apply to contribute to Strixus – an exclusive community of visionary leaders.