Topical authority is having all the content regarding a topic within your website. It signals to Google that you are an authority on that topic. Bloggers use different methods to discover all the different possible articles they can write to blanket a topic.
What is Topical Authority
If you are a beginner blogger the first step to understanding topical authority is being able to break down your niche. If you create a blog within the “Make Money Online” niche then you need to understand all the sub niches that lay within the parent niche.
For example you can break “Make Money Online” into multiple sub niches in different ways. One breakdown could be the sub niches of online business and freelancing. Both of these would fall into the MMO niche.
You should continue to break the niches down until you reach a point that you can cover the topic within 15 to 20 posts.
How to Find All Questions About Your Niche
Before you begin building topical authority you must figure out all the questions people will have about your given topic. Here are four different methods for finding all questions regarding your topic.
1. Google
You can use Google in a couple different ways when trying to figure out all the different topical questions. The first way is using the auto complete function to find different queries. To do this place your topic in the search bar and start placing a letter after it.
For example if you were trying to build topical authority on “How to Make Money Writing” you would place:
How to make money writing a
How to make money writing b
This will give you hundreds of possible related searches for your list of titles. The second way to use Google when trying to figure out what questions are being asked about your topic is to look at the related questions section and additional searches section.
This is by far my favorite tool for finding all searches relevant for your topic. This tool allows you to place a query in and it will scrape Google for all the information then list all the queries.
This is the only tool I have spent money on thus far in my blogging career and I have not regretted it. They have several different plan options. If you purchase the plan you can see the search volume and competition level for each query.
3. Quora and Reddit
Both of these are great places to find out what people need to know within your niche. Simply go to either and search for your topic. There will most likely be hundreds if not thousands of posts or questions related to your niche.
4. Competition
One important part of being a blogger is being aware of your competition and what they are doing. To figure out a websites topical authority on a given niche use the Google operator site: with the given keyword.
Using the example “make money online writing” I found https://makealivingwriting.com/ was at the top spot for that specific query. If I wanted to see the amount of pages they have with these keywords I would type into google: site:https://makealivingwriting.com make money online writing.
The results showed this site has around 800 pages with these keywords. You can narrow down the pages with using quotations around specific keywords. If you do this make sure to use all synonyms.
How to Build Topical Authority
Once you have the niche broken down and have selected a very small topic to cover within your blogs niche there are two methods which help build the topical authority.
1. The first method to begin building topical authroity on the sub topic is using a pillar post with supporting articles.
If you choose this method I recommend using interal linking as Kyle Roof lays it out for his silo structures. The key to this is the internal linking structure within the silo. The Pillar post links to one support article and the support articles link to each other and the pillar post.
Here is a graphical representation of the silo structure:
2. The second method is simply writing articles covering all the different questions about the given topic. These articles should still be linked together since they should be closely related.
The internal linking structure of this method should have two focuses. The first focus is to ensure that no page will be orphaned. The second focus for the internal linking structure should be based on providing the best user experience. In other words link to articles when it makes sense.
Why Topical Authority is Important for SEO
There are two theories on why topical authority is important for SEO. Remember that no one has access to the Google algorithm besides Google engineers so no one knows exactly why or how this works.
1. The first theory is based on understanding NLP. NLP (Natural Language Processing) is the branch of computer science which focuses on how computers understand language (source IBM).
It is theorized that Google undrstands certain entities within language and how they relate to each other. If you blanket the topic with content which consists of these entities then Google will see you as an authority on the subject.
One important thing to note is Google’s understanding of language will change constantly. So think about topical authority as a spectrum rather than binary. You should cover the majority of the closest related topics that are relevant to the niche and move on.
It is also important to think about topical authority through the eyes of a human. Create articles that you believe will be helpful for a searcher to read. Do not create articles simply for the fact of increasing topical authority.
2. The second theory behind why topical authority is useful for SEO is relevance. Google will look at the internal linking structure within your site when trying to figure out what your site is about.
If you have 20 articles about the same topic it will be easy with internal linking to describe each page with anchor text and the text surrounding the link.
How to Measure Topical Authority
Topical authority is a difficult metric to measure. It is always evolving as Google learns. There are to methods I would recommend when trying to measure your topical authority.
The first method is exhausting your list of titles with the methods above. Once you have written every article possible within a given sub topic that will be a pretty good indication you have decent topical coverage.
The second method would be comparing your sites article count on the given topic with other blogs that discuss that topic. You can use the method I discussed above and use the site: operator with the keywords to look at the number of pages a competitor has on a given topic.
Important Note
Topical authority is not the only ranking factor Google has. Simply writing numerous articles on a given topic will not rank you for that topic in most cases.
The other factors to focus on is on-site SEO (Content Optimization), off-site SEO (Link Building), and technical SEO. To rank well for a competitive topic you will need these three things and topical authority to stand a chance.
Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions.