What is topical authority? Topical authority is the trust your website builds around a specific subject by consistently developing high-quality web pages on it. The higher the topical authority, the better will be the traffic & conversion rates. You can enhance your topical authority with the tips covered in our blog. Let’s have a look!
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How To Build Topical Authority?
Here are 6 steps for you to implement actively if you want to build trust for your website.
1. Build Topical Clusters
Topical Clusters are a set of pages built around the same subject. These clusters allow your websites to provide in-depth coverage on the chosen subject. The primary page covers the subject in a broader manner, while supporting pages cover additional insights relevant to the said subject.
Clusters signal that your website delivers user-oriented content.
- Cluster Keywords: Make a seed keyword from all your company’s products and services. These seed keywords will form your clusters.
- Cluster topics: Each cluster will have a unique list of topics. The first list of keywords that you get on firing one seed keyword at a time, will be the topic list for that particular cluster.
- Note: All your cluster sheets will contain topical keywords, but you must conduct another keyword research to obtain primary/secondary keywords for each cluster topic.
2. Develop Problem-solving Content
Google considers various factors while ranking your web pages. Hence, businesses can gain immense topical authority if they follow the steps below.
- Ensure all their content pages are unique, clear, readable, and informative.
- Naturally, add relevant keywords without going to the lengths of keyword stuffing.
- Align content with users – Solving their problems or educating them on places they lack clarity.
- As a bonus – Offering value that makes your content unique from the competitors, gives your webpage an upper edge.
Types of content that can assist you with topical authority:
- Cover contradicting takes on hot topics relevant to your industry.
- Cover interviews with industry experts.
- Cover FAQs (Frequently asked questions) that industry rivals haven’t yet answered.
- Publish well-researched white papers.
- Publish Case Studies on problems that your company solved for specific clients.
- Upload customer testimonies.
3. Get Backlinks For Topical Authority
Domain score depends on do-follow links. “Do-follow links” are also known as backlinks, and they determine your website’s overall trustworthiness. Here are four steps to build quality backlinks.
A. Outreach Campaign:
- Reach out to websites that serve similar niches as you and request them to link to your site.
- To craft a compelling pitch, explain what makes your website and its content unique, or how it has impacted users.
- Highlight the benefits they would gain from linking to you.
B. Broken Link Campaign:
- If you find a broken external link on a credible website’s page – Then suggest links to your pages as replacements.
- However, ensure that your pages are relevant to their content. Most website owners would happily replace broken links, as they bring down the user experience.
C. Unlinked Brand Mentions:
- An unlinked brand mention is when your brand receives a shoutout from another website without a link added to it.
- Use Semrush’s Media Monitoring tool to track unlinked mentions.
- You can elaborate on your business offerings for the users or highlight any other benefit they will receive by mentioning you.
D. Additional backlink strategies to scale your business:
- Guest Blogging: This entails publishing content on another competitor’s page and receiving a link for your website in exchange.
- HARO: Harness this online platform by posting a query and securing high-quality backlinks from journalists.
4. Regularly Update Content
Why update content annually even after it is already published? Here’s why!
- Information added to your content becomes outdated over time, so constantly replacing inaccurate details can be useful.
- Plus, the caffeine algorithm of Google craves fresh content.
- We recommend constantly monitoring and updating your cluster sheet to determine which pages should be kept, updated, removed, or merged.
- Update your web pages once every year.
5. Interlink Cluster Pages
Interlinking all cluster pages is a good practice. It allows you to drive users and crawlers to the relevant pages. For this exercise, you can divide your cluster pages into 2 categories, which will also affect your internal link-building strategy.
- Pillar/Hub page: The hub page will cover a broader topic and pass links to multiple topic-cluster pages.
- Spokes/Topic-cluster pages: Spokes are supporting pages within your cluster, they can link to your hub page, but not as much to your topic pages.
6. Leverage Google Algorithms To Your Advantage
The weightage that Google gives to each algorithm remains unclear, but we can confidently state that these algorithms significantly impact topical authority in SEO.
- Panda Algorithm: This algorithm hates plagiarized content, repetitive content, or low-information content — The only way to play around with it is by writing unique & original think pieces rife with useful information.
- Hummingbird Algorithm: This algorithm pays closer attention to the meaning of each query and connects them based on their relationship. So, finding LSIs from the following tools will make your content more impactful.
1. “People Also Ask” section – Google result pages
2. “Related Searches” section – Google result pages
3. AlsoAsked – Free Keyword Research Tool
4. Answer the Public – Free Keyword Research Tool - E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): If creators furnish their details on blogs, such as name, experience, expertise, brief description, and authoritative references, then crawl bots deem their pages to be more trustworthy.
What Is Topical Authority In SEO And Why It Matters?
To summarize in brief, “Topical authority” indicates the perceived authority of your website on a given topic. It is determined by a host of SEO factors such as domain rate, number of web pages that target topic-specific keywords, information depth, and expertise credentials.
How does topical authority SEO impact businesses?
- Enhanced Ranking: Google bots trust websites with higher topical authority and tend to rank their web pages higher for relevant keywords.
- Attract Natural Backlinks: Your webpages will be considered reliable on specific subjects, which will push other players to cite your pages as references – Thus driving traffic as well as crawlers to your site.
- Lowers Marketing Cost: You would have to spend less on Google ads, collaborations, and backlinking efforts as the topical authority will naturally rank you higher and get you referred everywhere.
How to Measure Topical Authority?
Topical Authority is a proven phenomenon but not a definite measure. You can only guess whether your topical authority is high or low, and in comparison to whom your pages are considered more credible, but there’s no score that is ascribed to any webpage.
However, even without any score, we have figured out three different methods to help you know where your website stands.
1. Website Traffic Analysis
Increased traffic hints at your website’s growing credibility. If you use Google Analytics, it will give you a detailed breakdown of these components.
- Impressions
- Click-through-rate (CTR)
- Bounce rate
- Retention rate
- Sources of Organic Traffic
Here are steps to further check the efficiency of your marketing campaigns:
- On Google Analytics dashboard, locate the “Reports” button in the top left corner.
- Click on the “Generate Leads” option and select “Traffic Acquisition.”
- You will now find a breakdown of your traffic depending on multiple channels.
- Filter the report by “traffic source” to gauge the impact of any campaign that you ran.
2. Backlink Analysis
Backlinks determine domain rate/domain authority, as they prove that your website is more credible. Because your website is gaining links from multiple sources. As a result, Google algorithms consider your pages more “authoritative.”
You can conduct backlinks analysis with these tools:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Moz.
3. Position Tracking For Topical Authority
Constantly track rank for all your cluster pages. If your rankings Improve, then it hints at increased authoritativeness.
- You can manually fire keywords and see the position of your website.
- Or use tools like Semrush and screaming frog.
Conclusion
Building topical authority is a promising strategy, given its definite results. It can overshadow problematic areas of your website SEO and help you rank higher! Just keep in mind that your content should provide everything your targetted viewers are craving — The outcome would be that your pages will rank for keywords that align with your product/service.
If your venture has just started investing in digital marketing operations, we suggest consulting experts before you roll out your big plan!
