I can’t stress enough how important creating quality content is, to many people prioritise writing as many articles for their webpage as possible, cramming in as many keywords as possible, unfortunately for them Google’s quality determining algorithms have become very smart and you have to be increasingly on top of your game with well-informed articles, and at the end of the day it makes sense as it is Google main purpose to ensure the searcher is getting the most relevant information possible for their search phrases.
There are many ways you can track the data for content quality. The metrics that help to determine these factors are Trust flow and Citation flow. Let’s dive in and explore these metrics more.
Trustflow
Trust is simply the measure of trustworthiness for your content. Is the information viewed as relevant by other businesses? This is a question that Google views as highly important and it relates to back-linking within your website. Back-linking is a mention by another, preferably authoritative website to your article via a link. When I say authoritative, I mean a website that has a large audience. For example, having a backlink from an article in a large news website like ‘Times’ will give your article huge trust flow and intern transfer authority to your article. This process of authority transferring to your website is often called 'link juice’, and will allow for more web crawling opportunities.
Building trust flow within your website can be a long and rigorous process, however if you invest time in this, huge results can be seen as you gain higher traffic numbers to your website and will therefor result in an increase in sales. Implementing a good back-linking strategy Is key. Guest posting is one way to obtain great backlinks from authoritative websites. This involves writing articles for blogs and submitting them for free, which will then gain you a back-link form them. This may say tedious, writing blog posts for FREE, but if a blog within your niche has 40,000 monthly readers the opportunity for those readers to go to your article is high and hopefully, if your content is well written, you will attract readers to your website through the backlink. Not only could building quality backlinks help drive traffic to your website, but it will also make you have a better trustworthiness rating.
Some may argue that link building isn’t as important as it used to be, but I think it still holds a crucial role in building brand trust. Not only does it increase traffic to your website, but also allows you to gain small partnerships which can benefit both brands in the future. I usually prioritise only reputable websites to get backlinks from, I aim for websites with a domain authority of 25 or above as much lower that this can be more harmful than beneficial to your trustworthy rating.
Citation flow
Citation flow, measures the other side of the sword. It measures the popularity of the link opposed to the quality (trustworthiness) of the link. An example of the comparison to these two metrics is spammy or pornographic websites, they may have huge popularity, so rank high with citation flow, but the content is low quality and irrelevant and therefore could be harmful to your website rankings.If you can get backlinks with high ratings for both trust flow and citation flow, that has high popularity, preferably a blog post specific to your niche and with high quality trustworthy content, then you’ve hit the jackpot.
A simple way to measure the popularity of a website is to input the website domain into any SEO tool. SEMrush for example will return you with monthly traffic volumes, if this number is high then they will have a high citation flow. On the other hand, to check for trustworthiness is slightly more complicated. A good indicator is the number of referring domains. When inputting a website domain into SEMrush, they return you with a backlinks section, in this section it will have a referring domains value. I look for websites that have over 100referring domains. For further research, you can also scroll through all of their backlinks and check the websites they have backlinks from, make you only search their do-follow links.
Key takeaways
Now more than ever, to build a brand online it is essential to invest your time in building a frame work of valuable, trustworthy content around your website.From blogs posts to general pages, content needs to be well formulated and informed. To ensure the content is reaching your target audience and generating high ratings for citation flow and trust flow, focusing on link building strategies like guest posting is vital. Overtime you will see your website ranking rise and traffic grow, and hopefully if you’re passionate about your business niche you will enjoy writing your ideas and as an added bonus make some more money $$$
