When I talk with potential clients about doing SEO for their website, one of the main questions I want to know is what type of a website they have. While for some things it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a website for a local business, e-commerce, affiliate website, authority website or any other type of website, for some things that make a big difference.
Obviously, if we talk about local business, citations will be very important, while that doesn’t make any difference for an authority website. For example, ClimateIMC is (what we call) an authority website in Croatia for everything related to medicinal herbs. When they write about medicinal herbs their content has more weight than when some local business talks about the same thing.
Local business will, obviously, talk in a way to sell you their product, while an authority website will talk in a way to give you the full picture about the topic they talk about. They will write about pros and cons, while a local business that sells tinctures made from those medicinal herbs will only say what are the good things for the certain product. Sure, the will write some warnings but only because they are obligated by the law, but they won’t write anything more than what they must write.
Another big difference between a local business website and an authority website is in the amount of content they have. While some business that sells medicinal herbs in Croatia will usually have a page for every product, plus few other supportive pages, an authority website like ClimateIMC will have tons of content. They will have pages for every medicinal herb they write about, then about every product they review, a lot of supportive pages that describe the uses of some medicinal herbs, etc. One of the most important keywords for them is tinktura od koprive and of course, they will have more than few pages that talk about that topic.
While local business will usually have only one page about that topic (to sell their product), an authority website needs to have few. Not that they need to do this only for the SEO purposes, but just the way authority websites are usually built, they need to have supporting articles. If you talk about nettle tincture (tinktura od koprive in Croatian), you need to have an article that talks about nettle and the medicinal properties of the herb. You need to have an article that talks about tinctures, to describe to the broader audience what a tincture is, how you make one, what is the main reason to use them, etc. When you have that, then you can go and write about nettle tincture and write more about that.
Sometimes you can do that all in the one article, but if the topic is broad, you need to avoid it, because chances are, you need to write more about some other nettle products, and more about some other herbal tinctures. If you wrote about it separately you can always link back to the original article so your readers can have a better picture about the topic.
If you check all the best authority websites, they are structured in that way. ClimateIMC ljekovito bilje had that structure even before I started working on their website, we just had to fix few things and everything else grew organically.