When you’re looking for information on a particular topic, there are some websites you trust more than others. But why is that?
It’s not random. Some websites definitely seem more credible and trustworthy than others, and it’s not just because of their more professional appearance or superior user experience design. Frequently, it comes down to authority, including topical authority.
A pivotal concept in search engine optimisation (SEO), topical authority may be hard to measure and define, but it matters in terms of results. Google trusts authoritative websites and ranks them higher in its search engine results pages (SERPs), which naturally leads to more clicks. Topical authority helps improve your reputation in a way that directly connects to higher conversion rates. In SEO, there’s more than one way to build brand authority and more than one term to describe it. However, topical authority is different from domain authority, another SEO ranking factor. While domain authority measures the overall trustworthiness of a website on several subjects, topical authority positions you as a valid voice on a particular subject. As a creative marketing agency with years of experience helping purpose-driven businesses rank highly on Google, topical authority is an area Anchor knows a lot about.
What is Topical Authority?
While topical authority lacks a single widely accepted definition, in the SEO community, it generally means your site’s expertise on a particular subject. The more helpful, informative content on your website, the more topical authority you can claim.
Building topical authority requires consistently creating or linking to high-quality content relevant to a particular topic or niche. The more content you write and publish about a topic, the more you increase your topical authority. Publishing only one or two articles about a subject may help you rank, but it won’t help you build your reputation as an authority on the topic.
Topical authority is strongly connected to search engines, especially Google. The history of topical authority is intertwined with major milestones in Google’s development. Nowadays, Google still remains the dominant platform on which to demonstrate your expertise.
How Topical Authority Works With Search Engines
As a search engine, Google works with semantic associations. In order for it to rank a website as a relevant resource for a keyword, it has to associate it with the topic at hand. When you create multiple pieces of content around the same topic and build links between them, your topical authority in Google’s view increases.
Google has an ongoing commitment to providing the best user experiences, and one of its methods is its regular algorithm updates, which include recent crackdowns on spammy, low-quality content. Semantic search (and, by extension, topical authority), as we know, was born from Google’s 2013 ‘Hummingbird’ update. Rather than ranking websites based solely on links and keywords, the search engine began to pay closer attention to the deeper meanings driving queries. Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ update of 2022 added ‘experience’ into its E-E-A-T guidelines, prioritising creators with firsthand knowledge on subjects.
As Google is still the most widely used search engine, it’s still the place where topical authority yields the best results. The pair have a symbiotic relationship—improving your topical authority will help with your Google rankings, and vice versa.
The Level of Importance Topical Authority Holds With Ranking in SERPs
Topical authority improves your rankings in Google. But how exactly does that work when you break it down? Here are some more specific examples of the ways that topical authority affects SEO:
Building trust
By consistently creating content that provides reliable answers, you build trust among your readers, which results in more returning visitors and higher Google rankings. Of course, higher rankings mean a greater number of clicks.
Better link building
If you build a reputation for expertise, other websites and bloggers are likelier to share your content, enhancing your credibility even further. These links also act as “votes of confidence” for Google, making them look even more trustworthy and appealing to Google’s algorithms.
Cost-effective marketing
Building topical authority is a long game, but it also has long-term pay-offs, and these benefits are worth the wait. One of them is more efficient, cost-effective marketing. When you’ve built up authority in a particular niche, it’s easier to outrank your competitors, meaning less money to spend on marketing campaigns and pay-per-click advertising.
How to Build Topical Authority
A big part of building topical authority just involves covering the basics of SEO: essentials like keyword research, well-written content, link-building, good title tags and meta-descriptions, and responsiveness. When you have the fundamentals of SEO down pat, here are some simple steps to topical research that enhances authority.
Focus on a handful of niche topics
On the internet, there’s always someone looking for information on a given topic, no matter how obscure. The less competition you have, the easier it is to become a trusted voice in your field. Rather than attempting to cover all the available information about a particular subject, focus on a select few niches or subcategories of a given area. This will make it easier for you to create valuable content that truly makes an impact.
Carry out topic-based keyword research
The more relevant and search-friendly content you have on a topic, the more authority you can build. While keyword research is obviously important, it won’t get you the results you want on its own.
Write content that solves problems and answers queries
Create content that meets the needs of human readers, not just bots crawling Google. Content that draws on your own personal experiences, features viewpoints from experts, or answers questions that other websites don’t is particularly effective for proving your credentials.
Plan your approach to link-building
While building topical authority helps with your link-building, you can still take some steps to help move the process along. These include reaching out to other sites and requesting links, offering links to websites with broken ones and following up with unlinked mentions.
Building your topical authority on Google involves a lot. Fortunately, a good creative marketing agency can make it easier.
Build Your Topical Authority and Improve Your SEO with Anchor
If you want to improve both your topical authority and the strength of your overall SEO strategy, Anchor can help. A Brisbane-based hybrid creative marketing agency, we take a multidisciplinary approach to your marketing efforts, incorporating all the strategies to drive the best results.
61% of business-to-business marketers say SEO drives more traffic than any other marketing strategy, and Anchor’s best-practice SEO services always align with the story you wish to tell. Our SEO approach includes content marketing measures like websites, blog posts, and social media posts, plus A/B and multivariate testing and transparent reporting.
Our marketing approach goes beyond SEO tactics, as important as they are. As part of our marketing strategy work, we can help you identify your unique selling proposition (USP) and collect data on your target demographics. Using brand positioning, workshop facilitation and customer and market research, we help you identify what you do better than your competitors and demonstrate it to the world.
If you’re ready to enhance your SEO and topical authority and become even better at what you do, contact the Anchor team.
