Expert Interviews: The Key to Better Content

At Flaunt Digital, we’re honoured to work with clients who possess vast and impressive expertise in their specialisms. While we writers implement in-depth research for all of our client blogs, that doesn’t compare to the years of experience, knowledge, and talent accrued by our clients, which is why we marry our content expertise with a client’s field expertise through thought leadership interviews.

Flaunt’s clients are industry leaders and innovators, and their content should reflect this.

Thought leadership content describes blogs, guides, and other on-site writing that contains unique insights, opinions, and ideas from a specialist. This content is unique, offering talking points that aren’t seen on competitor sites, signalling it as a useful source of fresh information to Google.

It’s also valuable for EEAT, an acronym describing components of helpful content that stand for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Our EEAT blog can explain how each component works and can be implemented.

Thought leadership content and interviews work to showcase expertise, the second E of EEAT. Naming and showcasing your expert confirms to both readers and algorithms that your brand knows its stuff and can be relied upon.

You have experts, we have writers – together, they can create incredible content.

Your experts likely have a thousand blogs’ worth of knowledge in them. But do they have the time to write them? Of course not, they’re field experts with a million plates to spin.

That’s where our content specialists come in, taking only an hour of your expert’s time to ask the questions that gather the best intel. Then, we transform the answers into skillfully written blogs, guides, landing pages and more.

Your expert’s incredible knowledge doesn’t deserve to be buried in the SERPs. And with the help of SEO content specialists, it won’t be. When we transform your wisdom into a blog, we bring all of our SEO know-how. From optimised introductions that ensure Google classifies the content correctly to tailored headings and keywords interwoven into the text, we implement tried-and-tested techniques to ensure that your expert content will rank.

The other side of the content coin to SEO is writing. From tailoring language to the client’s tone of voice to creating excellently structured and understandable pieces, we take everything discussed in an expert interview and make it digestible, appropriate for the content type, and appealing to read.

Experts live and breathe their specialism, so it’s easy for them to forget that certain things aren’t common knowledge. A content writer will bridge the gap between your expert and your consumer.  

An inevitability of expert interviews is that your expert will use acronyms and jargon that someone less specialised in the field wouldn’t quite understand. Our interviewers catch these specialist terms, ask for definitions and explanations, and then let the interview proceed smoothly onward with a better understanding.

Our content specialists employ several best practices to gain the most useful and rich knowledge from an expert interview.

There is absolutely no point in wasting an expert’s time by asking questions that Google could easily answer. An expert interview searches for the answers that a scroll through the SERPs can’t find. So, our specialists familiarise themselves with the generic and broad information already available to ensure that they are going into the interview with a solid base understanding of the subject. This then allows us to ask the questions that push further.

Expert interviews aren’t about what our content specialists want to know (as much as we find the interviews fascinating). It’s about what your potential customers want to know. That’s why we conduct research into the longtail keywords surrounding your specialism and search for the gaps, where queries simply aren’t answered in the current available content. That’s where we find prime subject matter for an expert interview.

When we create questions for an expert interview, we always bear TAP in mind. No, not the thing on your sink. It’s an acronym, meaning:

T- Type of content

A- Audience of content

P- Purpose of content

By holding these three things in mind, we keep the interview from getting off track and ensure that the discussion remains beneficial to our overall goal.

Balance is the best choice with everything in life, and that’s our view when it comes to whether expert interviews should have structured questions or free discussion. 

Pre-preparing questions and knowing what you’re trying to get out of the interview keeps things on track. However, we don’t like to pre-prepare too many questions. Why? Some of the most beneficial questions come to mind in the moment, inspired by the discussion at hand, and these can result in some of the most insightful answers.

So, unless a client specifically requires an interview to be conducted using only pre-planned and pre-approved questions, we like to embrace flexibility to produce the best results for expertise-rich content.