Whenever we hear the word ‘authority’, it creates admiration in our minds. Because authority comes from prolonged experience, expertise, and skills.
Topical authority is no different. It refers to a website’s expertise and reliability on a specific topic or subject.
Topical authority cannot be gained overnight. Instead, consistently creating high-quality content on a specific topic for years can help your website gain topical authority.
This article shall discuss topical authority, its impact on SEO, and how your website can become an authority in your niche.
What Is Topical Authority?
Topical authority is a system developed by Google to measure which websites can be considered expert sources that offer the most valuable information to a searcher’s news-related query in specific niches like health, finance, and politics.
However, that does not mean that you can ignore topical authority if you cover a different niche or offer content other than news. Because it is closely related to Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) factor.
Achieving topical authority indicates to Google and other search engines that your website is reputed, the content is reliable, and searchers trust the information available on your website.
Importance Of Topical Authority In SEO
Suppose you are at a showroom of electronic appliances with the intent of buying a specific item. You will find many brands offering that item, and each brand has a sales representative demonstrating the product.
The brand representative who confidently demonstrates the product, passionately describes its features, and provides satisfactory answers to all your product-related questions will gain your trust more than others.
You will be inclined towards finalizing that brand.
The same thing is applicable for online also.
Your informative and valuable content acts as that sales representative that nurtures your online buyers. Your topical relevance indicates to search engines that your website offers knowledgeable and trustworthy content to readers.
Google’s primary goal is to offer the most relevant, high-quality content to the searchers from the most authentic and credible sources.
Moreover, Google emphasizes helpful content even more after rolling out their ‘Helpful Content Update’ on December 05, 2022.
That makes topical authority SEO even more important for any website that wishes to rank higher on the SERP.
What Are The Benefits Of Topical Authority?
Building a topical authority on your niche offers you the following benefits,
Earn Trust From Users And Search Engines
Achieving topical authority helps your brand earn the trust of searchers. That, in turn, boosts your fresh organic traffic and returning customers.
Topical authority also helps your brand gain trust and confidence from search engines, resulting in a higher SERP ranking.
For example, Amazon and Shopify have earned a topical authority on dropshipping. Hence, Google considers their information trustworthy and ranks them higher than other websites if someone searches for ‘dropshipping’.
As a result, these two websites gather the highest amount of organic traffic for that specific term.
Enhance Your Backlink Profile
If Google considers your website authoritative in your niche, it will encourage other websites to mention and link your content, which naturally helps your website earn quality backlinks.
A solid backlink profile drives more organic traffic and boosts your conversion rates.
For example, RankWatch has mentioned stats from Statista in their article “All You Need To Know About YouTube Algorithms in 2023.”
The reason is we trust the information available on their website, and we know the stats will benefit our readers as well.
You must examine your total number of backlinks and the link acquisition trend before and after building topical authority to gauge the difference.
RankWatch’s backlink checker tool can make this task a breeze.
The tool offers the essential data related to your backlinks in seconds.
Lower Your Marketing Costs
Building topical authority is a gradual process, but once you achieve it, it can significantly reduce your marketing overheads and time.
The most straightforward example is when a brand’s topical authority outranks a giant e-commerce store.
Apple’s topical authority on ‘iPhone’ outranks Flipkart even after implementing a compelling meta title.
How To Build Topical Authority?
Now that you know topic authority is essential for SEO, you must be eager to build the same for your website.
Here you go,
Perform a Broader Keyword Research On The Topic
A well-researched, informative, and high-quality content becomes authoritative when it satisfies a vast number of users.
It is only possible if your web page is displayed frequently on the SERPs and users often click on the link. This means a higher impression, and CTR is essential to gain topical authority.
That, in turn, is only possible when you conduct a broader keyword search on the topic. It will enable you to target all relevant and related search terms within your content for better optimization.
RankWatch offers an excellent keyword research tool for this purpose.
You need to follow the simple steps mentioned below,
- Log in to your RankWatch account and visit the dashboard.
- Go to keyword research and enter your primary keyword.
- Hit the ‘Search’ Button after selecting the location.
- The tool will show the entire list of keyword suggestions along with their search volume, competition, and CPC.
- RankWatch also suggests keyword-based questions that most users type during their searches. Using those suggestions can significantly increase your SERP rankings.
Once you have completed your keyword research, you can use those keywords in your web page content to build a topical authority.
Create Pillar Page And Topic Clusters
Creating content clusters, aka topic clusters, has become one of the most effective ways to gain topical authority.
Topic clustering is the process of creating multiple web pages around a specific topic to build topical authority.
You must create a pillar page for each topic cluster that provides an overview of the main topic.
Then, you must create cluster pages around the topic. Ensure that the pillar page links to these cluster pages and that the cluster pages are linked back to the pillar page.
For example, if you are into the fitness niche, you can create a pillar page on ‘Workout Routines’.
Then, you can create cluster pages on several associated topics like workout routines to lose fat, workout routines to get abs, etc.
Plan A Solid Link-Building Strategy
High-quality backlinks on web pages reflect reliability and authoritativeness to the search engines.
Hence, a solid backlink profile is a must to enhance your topical SEO.
Though it is beyond your control which websites will link to your content, you can try the following effective strategies,
Email Outreach
Email outreach is the process of requesting high-authority websites to link to your content via email.
It is one of the most proven and direct approaches for link-building. However, you must prepare a compelling pitch explaining why it will benefit them to link to your website.
Identify Broken Links
If you find external links on other websites of your niche that are broken or outdated, you can offer them a live and updated link offering similar content from your website.
Dead links spoil user experience; hence, most website owners will gladly accept your offering, provided your content is valuable and relevant.
Similarly, it is also essential to check at regular intervals that all the backlinks acquired by your website are live and active as well.
RankWatch’s backlink analyzer tool offers you that privilege by providing you the ‘Deleted’ status of your backlinks with date. That will help you easily identify your broken links.
Identify Unlinked Mentions
When a website mentions your brand but does not provide a link to your website, it is called an unlinked mention.
Unlinked brand mention does not pass any link juice to your website. Hence, you must approach the author to provide a link by convincing them about the benefit of linking to your website.
Create High-Quality Content That Solves Problems
It will be of great help if you put yourself in searchers’ shoes while writing your content. Then you will understand users’ intents and expectations while they perform a search.
You need more than just placing your targeted keywords naturally within your content to target your audience.
It will be of great help if you can choose the right tool to provide content improvement ideas and recommendations.
Here comes the SEO IQ feature of RankWatch to provide you with those tips.
The feature offers improvement ideas for your web page content in detail.
You can get suggestions on keyword usage by clicking the content recommendations tab. That also measures the relevancy of the keywords to the context of your content.
You can find the optimization status of your web page content by clicking on the ‘Content Editor’ tab. The tool also provides you with keywords for better optimization.
Clicking on the ‘Questions’ tab of the content editor will provide you with the most popular search queries often used by searchers.
Creating a FAQ section using those questions shall definitely help you to build a topical authority.
Conclusion
Whenever we try to find a solution to our problems, we look for an authoritative source. The world of the internet is no different.
When searchers perform queries, they expect the most relevant and valuable information. And Google prioritizes user experience the most.
Google ensures they offer the most relevant information from a source that abides by their EEAT signal.
That is why you must build a topical authority in your niche by providing top-notch content targeting all the related search terms that satisfy your users, creating content clusters, and building a sound backlink profile.