Topical Authority 101: What Is It, How to Do It, & Why It Matters? 

Don’t you want to position your content higher, with more search results and traffic? What if I told you that you can easily achieve such goals with topical authority?

The world of search engines is constantly evolving, and the changes impact how your content will be ranked and displayed.

So, there should be a strategy that can help you always stay on top and ensure that your website is ranking well in your niche.

There comes the concept of topical authority. It is considered the key ranking and can easily level your ranking game. You can easily build up topical authority if you have developed the right content strategy.

This article will explain topical authority, why it matters, and how you can develop topical authority for your sites. Read on.

The Definition of Topical Authority

The idea of topical authority is mainly an SEO concept used to perceive authority and expertise on more than one topic.

If you can create high topical authority for your website content, you will be able to achieve credibility and the potential to rank yourself for related keywords.

In simple terms, topical authority is about measuring the credibility of your website. To achieve this, you continue creating high-quality content on a given subject.

Always remember, the more informative and comprehensive content you can provide on a specific topic, the more it will attract new readers to your site. The topical authority also creates your identity as a subject matter expert in that particular niche.

The Importance of Topical Authority

Topical authority is crucial for successful SEO. It helps build a long-term content strategy that is sustainable for your website.

If you are successful in establishing topical authority, you should not worry. Topical authority helps to improve website ranking, increase organic traffic, improve creditability, and more.

When creating your content and managing your website, you must ensure that your website is building authority. In this way, they will be able to stay competitive. So, you can make your brand more relatable to the keywords.

Always remember that if you can make your site more authoritative on a specific topic, it will be more profitable for you to rank your site higher in SERPs.

Even a new website can rank higher on the search engine result page with the help of SEO strategy and topical authority.

Google demonstrates topical building as EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). This EEAT may not be a ranking factor, but if you follow the guidelines, it will help you achieve a good ranking.

The Benefits of Topical Authority

When you are working on SEO, achieving topical authority can help you ace the strategies. This topical authority can also help improve your website visibility and marketing goals.

I will provide you with a few examples in the following that can help you understand the benefits of topical authority.

• It helps to gain more traffic for your website.  
• You can get quality backlinks for the website.  
• Topical authority can help increase conversions and turn them into revenue.  
• You can build brand trust, and a better reputation and credibility as well.  
• With topical authority, you can achieve a higher ranking through competitive keywords as well as topics,  
• It can also help increase the number of people who share social media.  
• Lastly, you can improve website crawlability.

Strategies For Building Topical Authority

So, the main question is how do we build topical authority for a website?

Once you cover all the basics of SEO basics, you will see that building topical research is very straightforward. There is nothing extravagant about it.

If I go for the simple terms, to build Topical authority, you will have to:  

• Conduct keyword research to understand what talking points you can find on a specific topic. 
• You have to organize all your data into topic clusters.  
• Focus on producing content that is relevant to keywords and meeting user’s search intent.  
• Consider building both internal and external links for your content.  

Without any further discussion, let’s get into learning how to build topical authority.  

Perform keyword research for the topics that fall under your niche

When you are trying to improve your topical authority, your very first step would be to perform keyword research. The research should be based on the topics that fall under your niche.  

Look for topics that have a high search volume with low keyword difficulties. Remember, if you choose keywords that are specific, they will have less competition than general ones with huge competition.  

Moreover, more topic-specific keywords can help you to establish yourself as an expert in that specific topic or niche. So, if you are willing to achieve topical authority, you will have to cover all the issues that particularly fall under your niche.  

You can also get a strong grip on specific topics with the help of long-tail keywords. These long-tail keywords help to answer a particular search query.  

For example, “Where to find Vivienne Westwood heart-shaped red bags” shows that the user’s intention was to specifically know about the store locations where that heart-shaped bag can be found.  

Try to aim for these kinds of long tail keywords to address the queries and satisfy user intent.  

Create various topic clusters.

Once you have completed the keyword research, you must start brainstorming ways to organise your topics.  

Remember, your pillar page should be the most comprehensive page. Every other page related to that will be considered a cluster page.  

The moment you start creating content based on the keywords, you must link the pillar page internally to those specific topics. This makes it easy for Google to relate to all your pages on your website.  

It also helps to pass authority from one page to the other one.  

Consider writing well-crafted content

Once you are done organizing your topics through topic clusters, you can start creating all the content based on that topic. While creating content, you must ensure that your content includes enough information about the subject. They are relevant, and they will genuinely help the users.  

Remember, providing user-friendly information while maintaining consistency will encourage users to engage more with the site.  

Ultimately, your site will be able to establish itself on the Google search engine through better ranking and reach your audience.   

When you begin creating your content, consider the questions that the users may have regarding the topic. You can also make yourself a user to see if the content is satisfying your search intent.   

You can also refer to the “people also ask” on Google for the target keyword that you have chosen. All of these questions should be targeted under the H2 heading tag. This way, you can help Google and your users find the information very easily.  

Build relevant backlinking

Backlinking is considered a crucial part of SEO. These backlinks are useful to let Google know that there is other content that also finds your content valuable, and they link it to their own content. 

Building backlinks can help to transfer authority from one site to another. So, if you are receiving backlinks from a certain website with higher authority, you will know that your domain rating will also improve eventually.  

There are two specific kinds of backlinking: internal and external.  

Internal Linking

When you are creating an internal backlink, try to link to pages already on your site. So, while creating content, always look for ideas from your own blog posts that are already related to the topic.  

If you see a topic related to an already published article, connect both articles by an internal link.   

External Linking

External linking is a crucial factor for topical authority. Here, the links direct customers from your websites to someone else’s. External linking is also known as outbound linking. 

It is more like passing authority to your own website. If you see that some websites with higher authority have linked to your website, it means Google will consider your website more authoritative. 

But how do you receive such external linking? 

Well, you may have contact websites that are more related to your niche. Look for the ones with high authority. Choose blogs or content that can add value to your website. 

Wrapping it up!

In conclusion, you can craft a vast number of high-quality contents based on a broad subject. But once you start interlinking them, you actually increase the topical authority.  

Creating topical authority helps to show your expertise in a specific topic. It will also make you a trusted source. These are the SEO efforts that can boost your rankings and website traffic and achieve overall business growth for long-term success.