What is Topical Authority and How Do You Earn It?

There’s so much competition these days to get our websites to rank high in the search engine. While the first page of any search engine is the goal, getting a space even on the second or third page is great news.

But how do you land a spot even there?

In this article, we talk about a less-discussed aspect of SEO, which can help your website rise through the ranks and move into prime search engine real estate in no time. The element we’re talking about is “topical authority”.

What exactly is topical authority?

A topical authority is exactly what the phrase suggests – it signifies the authority that someone has about a particular topic. If your website has topical authority, you’re essentially the go-to place for any content related to that topic.

For example, let’s say you have topical authority over post-pregnancy fat loss. Then your web page or entire site will deal with all aspects of post-pregnancy fat loss, such as birthing experience, heredity, fluid retention, post-birth fatigue, parental stresses, erratic newborn sleep patterns, etc. Each of these topics will have its own sub-topics, which will have sub-topics of their own. When you create such rich content, you can expect a large number of people to visit your site, recommend your site, and buy your products, because of your expertise in that topic.

Why is topical authority so important to your brand?

Topical authority is super helpful in establishing your thought leadership and brand expertise. This is because it foregoes the short-term benefits of creating random content that is typically done for keyword appearances. Instead, topics are consciously chosen to create content that will add genuine and deep value to the site visitors. Here your focus will be on answering the specific questions any users will have, rather than writing anything you want for the sake of keyword hits.

Now don’t get us wrong, you’re not completely foregoing keywords here. It’s just that your keyword choices will be more mindful and aligned organically to the topic and the information you're providing. Essentially, we’re using LSI keywords and semantic keywords here. They will not only help your website get keyword hits but also won’t compromise the quality, flow, and intent of your content.

When you develop topical authority, search engines like Google will recognize that your entire blog post or video, or website, is geared to answer the myriad questions users will have. In Google’s eyes, your website becomes an important data repository, which will actively push up in ranking, so it can be found easily by users. In fact, websites that have developed topical authority will find it easy to get their content published as SERP featured snippets.

This is the best news you can hope for because studies show that featured snippets get 8% of all search engine clicks! So, how do you build topical authority that can help your content become a featured snippet?

Tips for building your website’s topical authority

Two key factors matter when it comes to topical authority -

• The individual page authority
• The domain authority.

Some of the ways to increase both of these are –

1. Create content people want to learn about

Look through trending keywords to learn what people want to know about

This could be sifting through Google AdWords or looking at the Related Search Results at the bottom of the search engine page. By finding out what people are searching for, you can know what type of relevant topics to cover on your website.

Monitoring trending topics on social media will also help you identify keywords people use to find the content they want.

Keep an eye on the comments on social media and blogs

Conversations on social media and in the comments section of your social profiles or blog posts can be great sources of topics. You can hear from customers/audiences about what they want to learn from you. In fact, you can directly engage with them to get to know the intent behind their queries – which will help you create more-aligned content that will help engage and convert them.

If you don’t have any social media accounts or don’t receive much traction on your public profiles, ask your sales team or customer service team about common customer/prospect queries. Since they closely interact with customers/prospects regularly, they’ll be able to give you significant insight into what people wish to know about.

2. Add high-quality links to your content

To become a topical authority, you need to share as much relevant and value-adding content as you can. Sometimes though, you may not be an expert in a certain related topical area. In that case, it helps embed links to other high authority websites with excellent content.

Such outbound links can also help you build backlinks to other high DA websites too.

3. Get your keywords right

Remember how we said that topical authority can be built using LSI and semantic keywords? Well, a few ways to get your keyword choices right are –

• Determine your primary keyword based on the search intent behind the content you’re creating.
• Use keyword clusters closely related to your primary keyword in the post.
• Synonyms and sometimes even antonyms of the keywords can help your post rank higher.
• Add the questions people ask, inside the content. (For example, “Why lose weight after pregnancy?”)
• Add your primary keyword and a secondary keyword in your meta title, description, alt tags, and all the headers.
• Optimize your anchor text with multiple related keywords.
• Make your content readable by avoiding ill-fitting keywords.

4. Design the site to become more user-friendly

Your website should have –

• Fast page load speed under 2 seconds.
• Device compatible layouts.
• Site map for easy navigation.
• Accessibility features for easy use by all audiences.
• Unbroken links to within and outside the site.
• Fast loading images and videos.
• Text font and formatting that is readable.
• Buttons and widgets for site functionality.
• Social sharing options.

These will automatically increase your page and domain authority, helping boost your website’s ranking.