How do you become a topical expert for your website?
First, you need to know the SEO basics. For example, an understanding of keyword research, internal linking, page structure, etc. With the basics covered, building topical content is relatively easy.
Follow these general steps to build topical authority for your content:
- Pick a topic to focus your expertise
- Do topic-based keyword research
- Select a wide breadth of topics to cover
- Use relevant subtopics to build content depth
- Write valuable content that meets search intent
- Build content clusters with internal linking
- Keep your content up to date regularly
Let’s look at these seven steps in more detail:
1. Pick a Topic to Focus Your Expertise
First, choose a topic relevant to your website and audience. To become a subject matter expert, you’ll need to cover this topic in-depth.
Keep your topic somewhat broad, like “electric bikes” instead of “bikes.” Also, avoid going to niche and limiting the number of supporting articles you can write.
For example, “Aventon eBikes” would be harder to build topical authority than “eBikes for heavy riders.”
Also Read: What is Thought Leadership Content Marketing?
2. Do Keyword Research to Find Topics
Keyword research is often the starting point for building topical authority. Topical research will also help you plan your content strategy.
Use a keyword research tool and SERP analysis to identify subtopics, phrases, and questions users are searching around your topic. Aim for informational top-of-funnel (TOFU) topics rather than transactional bottom-of-funnel topics.
Keyword tools also provide helpful metrics and other features to improve your content strategy. However, metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty can steer your content decisions in the wrong direction.
To become a topical expert, you can’t just target high-volume keywords. The goal is to cover everything within the subject, including queries with low or no search volume.
Sidenote: Including low-volume keywords, phrases, and questions can help gain content authority for large-volume keywords.
3. Cover a Wide Breadth of Topics
Topic breadth is the number of semantically-related topics you cover in your content strategy. In short, it’s the horizontal topic coverage across your website.
To create authoritative content for a given topic, optimize for content breadth and depth. This approach provides more value and makes it easier for search engines to associate your website with topically relevant keywords.
4. Use Relevant Subtopics to Build Content Depth
Content depth is how comprehensively you cover a specific topic. This means the content sufficiently covers a topic with relevant subtopics, talking points, and helpful information users want to know.
Providing quality topic depth also helps avoid thin content issues. Google defines thin content as “content with little or no added value.” This means low-quality, thin content will be difficult to rank high in SERPs.
Sidenote: Don’t confuse topical depth with content length. Many misleading articles online will tell you to write 2,000 words to rank #1. Long-form content with little value will struggle to rank high in SERPs.
5. Write High-Quality Content That Meets Search Intent
The best way to establish topical authority is by creating in-depth content that provides value and meets search intent. Then internal link those quality content pieces.
For each piece of content, be sure to:
- Write content that aligns with your topic and the search query.
- Build content depth by covering as many related subtopics as possible.
- Match search intent (the reason behind a search query).
- Share your experience, expertise, and insights.
- Keep your content factual, helpful, and informative.
- Optimize readability with short sentences, short paragraphs, and simple terminology.
- Build a content structure that’s easy to scan, read, and digest.
- Include supporting images, videos, or infographics.
- Link to relevant content and trusted sources.
Also Read: How to Create a Content Marketing Calendar
6. Build Content Clusters with Internal Linking
A topic cluster is a group of related pages interlinked around a single topic.
The purpose of topic clusters is to group relevant content, making it easier to find by users and search engine crawlers. As a whole, these pages also offer comprehensive coverage of a specific subject.
Your content cluster should start with a robust pillar page and include internal links to all topically related cluster pages.
For example, a topic cluster consists of three parts:
- Pillar page (or hub): The main pillar page generally covers a broad topic and links to multiple topic cluster pages.
- Topic cluster pages (or spokes): These supporting pages cover related subtopics more in-depth and link back to the pillar page.
- Internal linking to connect and organize all these pages.
7. Update Content Regularly to Maintain Freshness
It’s essential to monitor and update your content continuously to maintain SEO authority.
Why? Content can become outdated or provide inaccurate information over time. Plus, Google rewards fresh, up-to-date content. According to Search Engine Journal, content freshness is a ranking factor.
Ensure you have a process to monitor and refresh old content regularly. Focusing on only new content and ignoring your old content can affect rankings and traffic.
For example, consider running a content audit once or twice a year. Determine what content pieces to keep, update, remove, or consolidate.
