Topical Authority for SEO in 2022

Pretty simple!

Topical Authority is the authority of a website established by publishing content around a certain topic so that search engines see it as an expert entity in the field. Essentially Topical Authority proves your website as an expert entity in your field, ultimately leading to search engines giving your website a boost in rankings for relevant keywords.

For example, if you own a construction company and you have implemented the most profitable keywords for your industry, such as “construction company in *your city*.”

You can’t expect to rank well for that keyword if your website only has five pages of content (‘About’, ‘Contact’, ‘Privacy’, ‘Services’, and ‘Home’) regardless of the volume of backlinks you try to build.

Instead, we suggest publishing articles specific to other “construction” topics, such as:

• Most Useful Construction Tools in 2022
• Best Materials For Your Home Flooring
• Drywalling 101
• How To Build a Custom Home?

As a construction company, you need to understand your customers and what they are searching for to know what you want to optimize through your content. Once you’ve published these blog posts, Google and other search engines will begin seeing your website as an authoritative entity in the construction field with a deep understanding of the industry. This is how you establish Topical Authority through SEO blogs. 

Ask yourself: Would you value a company that demonstrates its expertise through various articles and research or a company that only talks about its services?

We value businesses that can demonstrate subject matter expertise. Similarly, Google collects information and sorts through your website content in order to serve your customer’s search engine queries. So, prove yourself as an expert and gain the trust of your customers with Topical Authority.

Are these two terms describing the same thing?

Not quite…

According to Mailchimp, content marketing is a marketing strategy described as “creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media” to attract, engage and retain potential customers. 

The difference? Topical authority is an SEO tactic of using textual articles for search engines’ consumption instead of human readers. So, we can say that Topical Authority is a specialized part of Content Marketing.

Let’s dive into how to use Topical Authority to improve your website’s rankings on search:

HOW MANY ARTICLES DO I NEED TO WRITE?

Should I write 5 articles? Or should I write 10 or 50 articles to make it work?

Good question!

Here is how to find out:

Let’s pretend you own a construction company again in Toronto, your main keyword is “construction company in Toronto”. 

Step 1: Search for the keyword

Type in Google Search your targeted keyword: “construction company in Toronto”

Step 2: Extract the top 10 results’ URLs in a Spreadsheet

Copy the URLs of the top 10 organic results and paste them into a spreadsheet. You can use a Chrome Extension to selectively copy these URLs like Link Clump.

Step 3: Filter the result

Only include businesses like yours. In this case, filter out any Directory, Listing, or Review websites such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, Crunchbase, Houzz, etc.

Step 4: Check for their XML Sitemaps.

The XML sitemap usually locates in these 2 sub-directories:

1. /sitemap.xml
2. /sitemap_index.xml

The URL of the sitemap should be something like this: https://competitordomain.com/sitemap.xml

Step 5: Find the Posts’ Sitemap

Websites normally have different sitemaps for different types of content, such as posts, pages, categories, images, and videos. In this case, you want to find the sitemap for their posts.

Step 6: Record the number of URLs in the sitemap (a.k.a, the number of posts on the website)

Step 7: Rinse and repeat!

Now that you have the number of posts of all competitors, you’ll have an estimated number of posts required to rank competitively.

If your competitors don’t have a sitemap, you can use the function: “site:domain.com” to find all indexed URLs of that domain.

Traditional keyword research is finding relevant and profitable keywords that your website can rank for.

For Topical Authority, you don’t need to rank all articles. The goal is to boost rankings of the most important keywords for your business.

So, you don’t need to exclusively pick long-tail keywords to rank for; you can try to rank with highly competitive keywords, as long as they fall under your chosen authoritative topic.

There are many ways to find these topics, but we will recommend one most powerful tools called Answer the Public.

This is a web-based tool that will generate questions around a specific topic or keyword based on language and location. Now you have a ton of topics that are topically related to your niche.

CONTENT CREATION

This is the most important step, as it produces the actual results.

In this blog, we are not digging deep into content creation for SEO broadly but rather focusing on how to write content to boost Topical Authority specifically. 

Here’s what you need to keep in mind when writing content to boost Topical Authority:

Cannibalization

Avoid cannibalization at all costs! In other words, do not optimize any of the Topical Authority posts for the main keyword again. You only want the lead-generation page to target that keyword.

For example:

• Never use the exact-match keyword “construction company in *your city” in the Title, Description, or Headings of the supporting posts
• Avoid using that exact-match keyword more than twice in the body content of other posts.

Content Hub & Internal Link

Creating a Content Hub is a good way to strengthen your internal link structure, thus boosting your main page authority.

You need to place internal links in the body content of all those topically relevant posts. These anchor texts must be exact or phrase-matched with the keyword and point to the main page.

Yes, and it will still be a good practice not only from a search engine perspective but from users’ experience as well.

You would want to demonstrate your skills, knowledge, and capabilities to your target audience. So potential customers coming to your website know they can trust you.