What Is Topical Authority And Its Importance

Can you rank for every keyword without having hundreds of backlinks or a high domain rating?

Yes. The key is Topical authority.

With topical authority, you can rank higher and faster without having much spent on backlinks. That’s if you spend time creating content that builds you topical authority.

So, what is topical authority and how can it help your SEO? I’m discussing it all in this article.

Understanding Topical Authority

Topical authority is the credibility a website has for a subject. It signals the website’s degree of expertise in the topic for which they create content. 

A website or page with high topical authority is regarded as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information in its specific business or specialty. Because they are more likely to offer readers useful and reliable information, search engines like Google strive to place pages with strong subject authority higher in search results for queries about that topic.

Topical authority is a natural prerequisite for websites to aim to rank well in search engines. In fact, the more time you spend on building a website that ranks, the more you realize the need to establish yourself as a trusted resource within your industry. 

Benefits of Topical Authority To Your Website

In a sentence, topical authority helps you rank faster with less effort because you focus on what gives long-term results, not only quick results. 

Here are a few ways building topical authority helps you:

• Quicker ranking in top search results
• Less spent on high-effort strategies like backlinking and guest posting
• Higher trust from the target audience 
• Higher traffic and increasing curve for traffic
• More customers and higher earning potential 
• Well-defined content strategy that keeps you on track
• More in-depth content than your competitors 

Above all, topical authority makes your life easier. 

Imagine spending the same or even more time and effort month after month to yield the same results. I know you’d expect the efforts to reduce and the results to rise exponentially as time passes. 

Once you achieve topical authority, Google will start seeing you as an authority, and your newer blog posts will rank faster. With more rankings, your traffic will eventually rise. You’ll reach a threshold after which the growth won’t be linear. 

But that’s easier said than done. The path to topical authority is simple but not that easy. You’ll need to work on a few things before Google trusts you enough above your competitors. 

Let’s check what can bring you topical authority.

8 Steps to Build Topical Authority

1. Target audience and niche

You think you need to talk to everyone to get more customers, right? Nope.

I made the same mistake when I started in digital marketing. Talking to everyone never leads you to a single destination. To make your blog cut through the tough competition, you need to use the power of one. 

One niche — audience — One message 

If you try to address more than one topic to multiple audience personas, your blog will become a white noise machine. 

You can have sub-niches and audience segments under one umbrella but never deviate from the supreme one. 

Consider my blog as an example. I discuss content, marketing, and blogging. I also branch out into freelancing and money-making resources when they align with the main topic but never go off-topic. 

Even my target audience is fixed. Small businesses who need help with their blogging and SEO needs and beginner freelancers who need help understanding how to scale in the content industry.

When Google indexes each new blog post, it puts a brick in the wall of improving my topical authority. Both Google and my audience know who I write for and what I talk about. 

For example: ProductLed has understood the assignment of topical authority. When you search for their most important keyword “product led growth,” two of the top three results are by ProductLed.

2. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research

Keyword research is the backbone of your blog. It leads to a perfect topical authority you can achieve without making mistakes. It’s a topic to have a dedicated post on, so I won’t go in-depth here. But here are the basics of keyword research that you need to get right:

• Find the high-intent keywords for your niche

These are the keywords that when ranked, bring you direct sales. Think of the immediate pain points of your audience—they make up the keywords that lie at the highest priority for you. 

Let’s again consider my blog as an example. Since I provide consultation on blogging and LinkedIn Marketing, my high-intent keywords can be SEO content writing services, content planning tips, blogging tips, writing coaches, etc.

Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Also Asked, Answer The Public, or Chrome extensions like Keywords Everywhere and Ahrefs SEO toolbar to conduct keyword research for free. Then, you can upgrade to paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.

You need keywords that, when targeted in content, can directly lead your audience to become your customers. 

These keywords later become your topic clusters. 

• Develop Topic Clusters 

Topic clusters directly contribute to building your topical authority. Now you know that topical authority is built by content, but what kind of content? Topic clusters. 

When you create blog posts that revolve around a broad topic or theme, you make a topic cluster. 

Randomly writing content does more harm than good. As a rule of thumb, the more you create content around a single topic, the more it signals your authority to Google. It shows you’ve covered the subject in depth. 

Topic clusters are made of pillar posts (or hubs), which are the broad topics, and cluster posts (or spokes), which are the keywords related to those topics. Each cluster post is linked to the pillar post, and other cluster posts are linked to build a strong interlinked network that resembles a hub and spoke-like structure. 

One of the pillar posts for my blog is how to become a content writer. The cluster pages include keywords like content writing vs copywriting, how to use keywords in articles, how to write blog posts, etc. 

Cluster pages can belong to more than one pillar page. How to write a blog post can also be a part of the blogging pillar page. 

Once you’ve created this in-depth network, you start ranking faster and getting targeted traffic. 

• Create Comprehensive Pillar Content

Pillar pages or pillar content refer to the foundation pieces that serve as broad, authoritative guides on a particular topic or theme. These pages should be highly comprehensive, covering all aspects of the main topic. The goal is to create a valuable resource that answers the majority of questions and concerns a user might have related to that topic.

When creating pillar content, it’s essential to:

1. Identify the core topic and subtopics
2. Organize the content logically
3. Use visuals and multimedia
4. Optimize for search engines
5. Include internal and external links

Comprehensive pillar content serves multiple purposes: it establishes your expertise and authority on the topic, provides a valuable resource for users, and acts as a central hub for your cluster content, making it easier for search engines to understand and index the interconnected pages.

• Leverage Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are easy to rank for and usually have low difficulty. Because these searches are more specific than short keywords, they have a low but highly specific traffic volume. 

Ranking for these keywords ensures more earning potential if you use the long-tail variations of your high-intent keywords. I said more earning potential because long-tail keywords also have better conversion rates. Users searching with long-tail keywords often have a more specific intent, which means they are further along in the buying cycle or closer to making a purchase decision. 

3. Utilize Entity-Based Content Structuring

Entity-based content structuring means organizing content around key entities or topics instead of just by the content type. Entity-based SEO helps search engines understand the context of the content on your blog posts.

This content structuring targets ideas, not just keywords, so it naturally creates a better understanding of what is searched and offers better results. Instead of targeting keywords, you would create content around subjects and products most important to you and your audience.

4. Expert Contributions and Interviews

What better way to prove your expertise than by calling the experts themselves? Adding expert contributions, interviews, or quotes changes how your content is perceived. 

Who would you find more credible? The Google experts behind the algorithm or a blog who claims to have understood the algorithm? Obviously the former.  

I try to incorporate accurate expert contributions in all my blog posts. But when that’s impossible, I try to collect quotes and interview bytes off the internet to make the posts richer. I use SparkToro to find what my audience likes reading and listening to. I bookmark these podcasts and YouTube videos and transcribe them as quotes. 

Qwoted and Ask a B2B Writer are great resources, but again, they are time-consuming. I use my active network on LinkedIn for that. I’ve created a list of experts on LinkedIn and the content I enjoy reading from them, so whenever I need a quote, I know whom to ask.

Plus, I have a separate sheet of saved LinkedIn posts from them, which I embed wherever required. 

With all these resources at your disposal, it’s difficult not to create expertized content. 

5. Don’t Underestimate Internal Linking

Internal linking is a way of visualizing the topic clusters for search engines. When you create internal links from pillar pages to the cluster pages and vice versa, it shows the search engines how well connected your blog posts are.

When creating internal links, focus on the anchor texts as it’s an important factor for SEO. Don’t use the target keyword for every anchor text as it looks suspicious to the search engines. Naturally insert the links wherever they make sense.

As a common practice, I add internal links to posts in the same topic that work as secodary or LSI keywords and to posts from other topics that make sense.

| Suggested reading: How to make SEO efforts count for your business?

6. Optimize for Semantic SEO

Semantic SEO goes beyond keywords and considers user intent and your writing topic. Thanks to semantic search, search engines can now comprehend natural language more thoroughly, helping them determine the purpose of user queries and provide more accurate results.

Thanks to this change, users may now access pertinent information more quickly and easily without searching for irrelevant results.

The following are important tactics for content optimization for semantic search:

• Using sophisticated methods for keyword research to understand semantic linkages and user intent.
• Arranging information so that each page or article has a unique title and heading and there is no overlap.
• Utilizing schema.org or other structured data markup languages to produce rich snippets on search engine results pages.

Semantic SEO also has a key benefit in ranking one article for multiple keywords. It’s achieved through creating clusters of keywords. Instead of using only one keyword repeatedly in the article, you improve variety and comprehension when you use keyword clusters. Learn more about keyword clustering here.

| Suggested reading: SEO for service-based businesses

7. Be GrE-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google uses it to evaluate the quality of results its algorithm ranks. It’s a parameter that determines if the ranked results are helpful to the readers and offer accurate information.

Google uses E-E-A-T to ensure users get the most relevant content from their experience and expertise. If you’re adding first-hand experience to your content and getting it approved by a subject matter expert, you will get a green signal from Google.

Being transparent and upfront about everything you add to the blog and adding relevant proof of your experience is a wise move as it builds you as an expert. Here’s the complete guide on E-E-A-T signals for blogging I wrote. 

8. Build a strong online presence

Topical authority mainly depends on your blog content but does not solely stem from it. Your blog is just one online space where you showcase expertise. But there’s more to the web than blogging. 

You can’t ignore social media, especially today. If anything, an active social media presence only adds to the credibility and authority of your blog. Depending on the niche and audience of your blog, choose a platform where most of your target audience hangs out. 

For example, if you have an e-commerce store selling pop-culture merchandise, Instagram is the place for you because that’s where your audience is. If you run a B2B or SaaS company, your audience uses LinkedIn, so that’s where you should be. 

I have built a decent following on LinkedIn, which is my primary social media channel for promoting my blog posts. I know it’s a lot of effort to maintain social media when you already have a blog, but it’s worth the effort. 

And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when AI is at your disposal. ChatGPT or Claude are great tools that help you convert blog posts into LinkedIn posts. One blog post has content worth five to seven LinkedIn posts. Convert the blog posts into how-to guide carousels, single-line quotes, short videos or reels, and simple text posts. 

A multi-channel online presence shows Google that you’re a real person, and it’s not yet another faceless blog run by bots. 

Topical Authority Vs Domain Authority

Both are different parameters. Topical authority measures how authoritative a website is regarding a very specific topic. Domain authority measures a website’s overall credibility and trustworthiness across all topics. It ranges from 0 to 100. 

Though both are important, a low domain authority doesn’t affect your ability to rank. If you have established a strong topical authority, you can outrank your competitors with a domain authority of even under 20. 

There are many ways to build domain authority, such as building backlinks, guest posting, HARO outreach, etc. But without content, they can’t do much. 

Once you have content that ranks on the first page for the important keywords in your niche, you’ll have backlinks coming your way without much effort. 

Topical Authority Case Studies and Examples

Isn’t it best to see actual blog transformation rather than just reading about the concept? 

I’ve got you covered!

There are not just one or two but multiple case studies that prove that topical authority can change the blogging game. 

I’m adding the links to the case studies I found the best, as it’s better you read and listen to them than I tell you how they made it work.

Here you go:

• Importance of Topical Authority: A Semantic SEO Case Study (by oncrawl.com)
• Travel Blog Case Study (by Moz)
• 4x growth case study (by Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR)

Final Thoughts

Topical authority opens gates for many opportunities to earn more. Once you have a good traffic of more than 1000 visitors per day, you can use Google Ads, affiliate marketing, brand sponsorships, etc., to earn more through your blog.

Building topical authority is like revolutionizing your blog. Follow the steps mentioned above long enough, and you’ll reach the threshold after which your blog will only bring profits.

Got any questions about blogging? Book a consultation call with me!

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