Why Topical Authority Matters, all you need to know about the “Topical Depth” SEO Ranking Factor
We all know that the keywords and phrases you use in a document can play a part in your Google Rankings. However, can having similar articles on the same topic add more value to your rankings? Can the “topical depth” you add to your content present your site as being an authority on that subject.
In this video, we cover a practical example of how you could add depth/authority to your content. You can apply the same tactic to any topic.
Topical authority is an important SEO factor. It might sometimes make more sense from an SEO perspective to develop similarly themed content, and establish an authority around a topic than to focus on multiple differently themed topics.
Also, if you’re looking for a great tool for keyword research, I’d recommend KWFinder as a first preference because of it’s low cost and second, you could consider SEMRush.
Transcript –
I am going to talk about topical authority and its importance in SEO. Now many a times, that you will find yourself trying to optimize for a certain article and you might not really rank well because there are many people who are very specialized in that area or that topic. Now let me take an example. Now suppose you have a general real estate site and you want to rank for the term – how to negotiate a lease agreement.
Now, I have not checked the search results for this term at the time of this recording. But I can hypothesize a guess, that if Google has to determine the relevancy of these results, yes, it would look for most relevant articles but it would also give a slight preference to those sites which have some kind of topical/authoritative relevance to lease agreements/rentals in general.
So, if you’re writing a post on a very generic real estate blog on how to negotiate a lease agreement, and even if build some great links, that might get you some authority and help you rank to a certain extent. But what definitely can help is, if you had a few more articles on that topic, or so, I would assume because I have seen that to work in other articles that we have developed for our own blogs. So, if you have more related content around a particular topic, it’s sort of telling the search engines that I am not only doing this just for this one article, I have a lot more related articles related to this topic.
So, let’s take this example of how to negotiate a lease agreement. Now you develop an article on that. What if you, when you’re coming up with content ideas, why not write more on topics related to that. Give like a sample lease agreement, give sample content email outline that how you could email your prospective landlords or communication styles on how to word a lease agreement. There are many ways you could go about writing sub topics related to the main central topic that you have.
So, what you want to do is essentially tell the search engines that I am not just a single article piece on this topic. I do have a lot of content related to the topic and that gives you a slightly more higher score when it comes to thematic for topical relevance. So, if we take that as a factor, I think that’s a factor you can play with and how you can play with that is developing more content related to the keyword that you’re targeting.
So, many people when they write content, they’ll just pick one target keyword, write one article and move on to the next topic. I think you can build authority by writing sub-sets on the same topic targeting many long tail variations of the same topic and that can only help boost your authority within that domain.
So, a smarter way to go when going about content development is when you pick the content piece, try to write everything related around that. Master that topic. Become a leader in that space and that should go a long way in helping you rank further. So, yeah keep that in mind when doing content development and when thinking about what to write next.
Sameer Panjwani
Hey,
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Fantastic article! Good stuff on Google Ranking Factor. It’s very helpful for all SEO expert. Great essential tips and tricks. Thanks for this kind of informative article.