Back up your content with expert sources

Chris says: “Use expert sources. Make sure that everything you say is backed up by either an expert or personal experience.”

When producing content for other people, do you have conversations with brands about ensuring that your content incorporates quotes from experts?

“Absolutely. It can be someone within the organisation, or it could be an expert that they trust. It could be an academic paper that was published recently and includes groundbreaking news about that industry, as long as it’s coming from a place of expertise.

Of course, if the organisation employs every PhD in the industry, then that’s amazing. However, that isn’t always the case, and everyone has their area of specialisation.

If you can include a quote from someone outside the organisation, you are showing that you’re backing up what you’re saying – you’re going to the experts and making sure that you’re giving your users content they can rely on.”

Do you have to get permission from people outside these organisations before quoting their content?

“If you’re going to quote someone directly, then you absolutely should reach out to them, unless it’s some Yogi Berra quote.

Academic papers are used to being cited without people asking for permission. In fact, they love it when their work is used. Don’t rip off a graph from a paper, but you can use the data and explain what you think that means.

I will reach out to an expert that I find on LinkedIn, or reach out through the client themselves. They often have a network of people that they trust.

If you reach out and say, ‘Hey, what’s your perspective on this topic?’, they’ll often give you something original, purely from their perspective, and that’s incredibly valuable – both for the piece itself and from an SEO perspective. Then, you could reach out after the article has been published and they may refer to it or link to it from their own website. It’s built-in distribution”

Does incorporating these elements have a measurable impact, in Google’s eyes?

“Yes. Google’s been talking a lot more about expertise recently, and speaking from a place of authority. One way that they track that is authorship. Who’s the author of the article? We know that they track that from the recent API leaks.

While it’s difficult to tell exactly how much weight they give to that, they do care whether it’s being authored by someone who writes about this subject matter frequently. If you make sure that your subject matter expert is the one whose name is on the article, then that’s going to go a long way.

It’s also true that Google cares about duplicate content. You don’t want to have huge portions of your article be plagiarised, obviously – or even be made up of quotes from other articles, because that isn’t original. However, if you can get an original quote, where you’re speaking from authority, that does seem to make a difference.”

How do you determine whether someone’s likely to be an expert in the industry?

“There are a number of ways of determining that. Firstly, if they have relevant credentials – like a degree or a license in the subject. I might go to a CPA if I’m talking about accounting or a PhD if I’m talking about an academic subject.

It could also just be having years of experience writing about or doing the thing that we’re talking about. I’m not going to a PhD if I’m writing about HVAC, but I might go to a real HVAC repair person.

You can search on LinkedIn and see who comes up first. Also, you can reach out to local businesses and local people who are looking to increase their own profile. Obviously, if you’re writing an article referring to them as an expert, people usually like that. They like to be viewed as experts. It’s a compliment to be interviewed and asked about your opinion on a subject. It adds value to you, and it adds value to them as well. It’s a win-win.

On social media, if someone is an influencer – even a micro-influencer – on the topic, that’s a great sign that they’re well respected in the field.

I use the term micro-influencer because it’s important to remember that, if something’s really niche (if you’re not just talking about AI, but a really specific subcategory of AI, for example), then they might not have that many followers. However, when you click through and see who those followers are, they might be some bigger names within the industry because this is the person who CEOs and other leaders and thinkers respect.

It’s not just about follower count; you can go in and see who those followers are.”

When these pieces are being published, do you link back to the author of each quote and incorporate schema?

“It depends on what they want. Some people are happy to help but they want to live their private lives, and they don’t want you linking to their LinkedIn, which is fine. Usually, though, if someone’s talking to you about something, it’s partly because they’d like to draw people’s attention to what they have going on.

That could be a social media page, a personal website, or their company’s website. Just talk about how they would like to be credited. They’ll tell you what they want.”

Is it best to use the same experts multiple times in different articles or get as many relevant experts as possible featured on your website?

“It’s good to have a variety because you don’t want to sound like you’re just a mouthpiece for one person who you go to every time. Building authority does involve a diversity of voices, but it’s also important to build these relationships up. That can have real value to it. You never know what direction that could go in over time.

Make sure to build in variety but try and maintain a relationship. Come back to people once every 3-6 months to remind them that you’re out there and that they like you.”

Do you try to produce other forms of content, such as video and audio podcasts, so that you can incorporate those elements as well?

“Absolutely. At Foundation, we have our own podcast called Create Like the Greats. Our CEO will interview experts in their field – everybody from symphony conductors to marketers – then he’ll take that podcast, publish it, chop it up into clips, and put those online.

Then he might write an article on a topic that they talked about. Those people are happy to be quoted in the article, using a quote from the podcast, because it’s on the same subject, and it brings even more attention to their expertise. There are definitely great ways of reusing that content in unique ways that continue to add value.”

Can you directly measure the impact of incorporating an expert in an article?

“It’s really hard to A/B test this. If you update an article to include expert quotes, it’s likely that you’ll get more traffic to that article. However, it’s also true that, if you update an article at all, you’re likely to get more traffic because search engines like it when you refresh your content.

It’s tough to compare that directly. You’d want a large sample size of very similar pages, some with quotes and some without, in order to really do an A/B test. Someone ought to do that.”

What comes first, the expert quotes or the article?

“Part of it depends on your own familiarity with the subject matter.

I was writing a piece about another company’s content strategy, and I like to think I know a thing or two about content strategy. I went to one of their heads of SEO and I said, ‘Hey, I’m writing this piece. I’d love it if I could quote you on this. Here’s the outline and a rough draft. Does this look right to you? Do you think that this accurately describes your content strategy? If so, here are some questions.’ That’s one way to go about it.

On the other hand, you might be unfamiliar with the subject matter. A couple of years ago, I didn’t know anything about AI. A lot of us didn’t. However, I had a friend who was getting his PhD in natural language processing. So, I interviewed him for an article, and I said, ‘Hey man, I’m going to level with you. I don’t know what any of these words mean. Can you walk me through this topic like I’m a fifth grader?’ Then, I wrote an article based on that.

It depends on where you’re coming from and how comfortable you are with an expert telling you, ‘I don’t think you know much about this.’”

Have you seen measurable SEO success from tweaking articles and adding quotes to them?

“Yes. We call these article optimizations, and I love doing them. There are a number of things that we do in that process and one of them is including more sources of expertise – through external links and expert quotes, real-life examples, etc. We typically see pretty great SEO outcomes from that, including rising in ranks and also ranking for a greater variety of keywords.

Oftentimes, we choose to optimize an article that used to rank well and doesn’t anymore. In that case, we know that there’s something valuable in there, but maybe the algorithm changed or it’s just a little bit outdated. Sometimes it says ‘2022’ in the headline.

Also, we prioritise bottom-of-the-funnel content. If there’s a landing page that you haven’t updated in 5 years, and it used to rank for some keywords and now it doesn’t, that’s a high priority. You could be getting a lot of revenue through that.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“A lot of SEOs get really stuck trying to fix small technical things that don’t end up having that much of an impact. You can ignore things that don’t lead directly to revenue. If you have a link that leads to a 404 error, that’s bad, and you should fix that.

However, hunting down and fixing every single one of those can take some real time. Instead, you could be optimizing landing pages so that they get more clicks or people finish their customer journeys, which leads directly to revenue.

It totally depends on what the situation is. If your entire website is a wasteland of dead links, you should probably fix that. However, if you are auditing every week and hunting through to find these minutiae, then that might not be a great use of your time.

The question is, what’s your biggest problem? If you don’t have anything screaming at you that it needs to be addressed right now, then looking closer to the bottom of the funnel is probably going to give you the best revenue outcome.”

Chris Meabe is Senior Content Specialist at Foundation Marketing, and you can find him over at FoundationInc.co.