The topical authority seems like a simple yet confusing term. Understanding it from an ordinary point of view tells that you have authority as an expert in a specific topic, which ordinary people may think is achievable only through knowledge and practical experience.
Nevertheless, building topical authority viewed from an SEO standpoint involves much more than knowledge in a particular area. It also includes constant analysis, searching, and understanding of what people want and how to achieve it.
Let’s find out what this term is, and look at the five reasons why topical authority is important from an SEO point of view.
What Is Topical Authority?
A topical authority is an SEO term that describes your expertise level in your niche. Authority and relevance are two measurements of how trustworthy a website is. Therefore, if you have high topical authority, search engines such as Google perceive you as an expert in your field.
Topical authority originates from high-quality content, authoritative linking, and social media platform presence. By gaining topical authority, you also gain several things in return.
5 Reasons Why Topical Authority Is Important
It shows how well you know your audience
A topical authority is how Google analyzes content based on the user’s search intent. It all comes down to keyword research. A topic can be composed of two or three keywords.
For example, “How to bake a pie” is a topic. But this topic still consists of 2 primary and relevant keywords, “how to” and “bake a pie.”
You establish topical authority if you write content relevant to your niche. However, this also shows that you know your audience’s needs.
Through topical authority, Google’s algorithms can see that you are constantly trying to satisfy your audience’s search intent.
It makes you a trustworthy expert in your niche
Besides showcasing how well you know your audience, topical authority is also an indicator of how much of an expert you are in your niche.
The higher your topical authority, the more the readers and the search engines trust you to provide relevant information in your niche.
Being an expert also means you strive to answer questions that people most frequently ask online and provide unique information that can only come from experience in the field.
Many topical authority websites that don’t have too much content have experts behind them, knowing that content quantity is not as important as content quality.
The more content pages you have on your site doesn’t make you become an expert in your field. On the contrary, the more quality content with relevant information your site has, the more expertise you have.
Topical authority works both ways. You help it grow by publishing quality written content while it shows your audience that you are the expert in your niche.
It is important for SERP rankings
Since Google’s Hummingbird update in 2013, more attention has been given to “phrases” instead of “keywords.”
With this technique, Google’s algorithms can learn about each reader’s search intent more efficiently, thus ranking better content information on the SERPs.
The Hummingbird update proves that Google has been more oriented toward topical authority now than ever. That means the more topical authority you have, the better and higher you rank in the SERPs.
You need a topical map to rank higher and be recognized by search engines. A topical map is a group of strategically organized content around a relevant topic that helps improve your page structure and topic coverage in your niche.
If you already have your website running without a topical authority map, there is someone that can fix that for you! CLICKVISION will create a topical map from scratch, including your published posts.
It ensures better crawl efficiency
Crawl efficiency is the search engine’s bots’ ability to discover and index the content on your website.
Using page pillars, topic clusters, and internal links increases your topical authority, increasing the crawler’s efficiency in scanning and indexing your site’s pages.
Proper internal link placement is vital to getting better crawl efficiency, and as your topical authority grows, your website and content structure will be better connected with these links.
Incorporating internal links into relevant keyword anchor text is an excellent strategy that tells crawlers what the site and content are all about. Since Google’s orientation to topical authority, more long-tail keywords that resemble topics are constantly targeted by its algorithm.
If crawlers have difficulty navigating your pages, your content is poorly structured, and you’re just randomly publishing content as you go.
It helps you market your brand on other platforms and domains
High topical authority enables you to promote yourself and your brand on other domains and platforms.
The more topical authority you have, the more respected you are, and the more other people will want to link back to your site’s content. It is a form of indirect marketing where your content pages become thousands of people’s go-to source of information.
As a result of topical authority, you can also choose how other people mention you and your domain and take advantage of guest posting and social media shares.
Participating in guest posts will further increase your topical authority. New and existing audiences will get to know the person behind the brand and see that they can trust your expertise.
By sharing valuable insights, expert opinions, and practical advice, you will establish more credibility for your brand and generate even more traffic to your site.
Conclusion
As you can see, topical authority dramatically affects the overall SEO process.
Even though people still stress keywords and keyword relevancy, the evolution of SEO is undoubtedly headed toward topical analysis and understanding why readers search for a specific topic.
Increasing your expertise in a particular niche, quickly promoting your brand, and ranking easier and higher in the SERPs is why topical authority is important from a semantic SEO viewpoint.