The last year has been a wild ride in search engine optimization. Most new clients who came to us, who have worked with a SEO before, need us to wash their website clean of all the bad, frankly black-hat work, that was done before. We have been helping new clients with past penalties and then installing white-hat SEO programs that focus on content, social media, social advertising and pay per click. The result is rankings and traffic go up each month, along with leads or sales, and the client ends up with a great deal of very high-quality content on their site.
One main thing that has become increasingly important in this new world of SEO is the need for SME, or subject matter experts.
What is a Subject Matter Expert
A Subject Matter Expert is someone who is an authority on that topic. Someone who really knows what they are talking about and can be the face of a company online in regards to creating quality content. Whether it be videos, articles, blogs, infographics, etc. The Subject Matter Expert is the driving force of the content.
Why do You Need a Subject Matter Expert?
When you have a quality subject matter expert, the content you create gets noticed. It gets shared across social media, it gets linked to, it gets ranked in Google and it drives traffic to your website! Ultimately, these social signals result in your website ranking for larger and larger keywords, until eventually you are ranking for the terms you want to in Google and other search engines, your referring site traffic is up and leads are coming in.
SME Can’t do it Alone
The issue is, Subject Matter Experts cannot do it alone unless they have significant Internet marketing knowledge. There are certain ways to configure things that are critical to be successful. This is why at Ignite Visibility we pair every client with high quality writers, social media experts and SEO specialists. This allows they client to not only have a Subject Matter Expert, but to make sure that the SME’s voice is heard across the web and all their hard work in that sector results in more traffic.
Do you Need a SME?
As we move forward in online marketing, especially post Google Hummingbird update, Subject Matter Experts will become critical. The serious companies, who want to outperform competitors online, will all have a head SME to ensure their content is quality and delivers the results they are looking for.