Imagine if your website (or clients) could rank for every single keyword related to a desired niche. Enter topical authority. Now imagine that you could even achieve this with no link building. If some people in the SEO world are to be believed, this is achievable by anyone willing to write content about absolutely everything within a topic. But realistically, you should still expect to build links and do a lot of other SEO activities. Topical authority is not a silver bullet. But it’s still worth your time. In this guide, you will learn everything you need to know about topical authority and how to build it for your sites.
What is topical authority
Topical authority is an SEO concept where a website aims to become the go-to authority on one or more topics. Building topical authority is about helping search engines executive data understand a website’s topic so that it has better potential to rank for topically related keywords. Let’s say you want to rank articles around the topic of protein powder. Writing just the one article targeting “protein powder” is probably not enough to compete in this niche. Why? Because it’s a massive topic and you can’t possibly cover everything about it in one article. To build topical authority, you need to cover everything related to protein, such as: Topical authority is achieved when a site fully covers a topic as a whole rather than focusing on just individual keywords.
If you’ve spent any
Time digging into the SERPs looking for SEO opportunities (and let’s be honest, you have), you’ve probably noticed sites with low Domain Rating (DR) scores ranking News US well—thanks to topical authority. For example, check out the SERPs for the keyword “mountain bike gifts”: At first glance, you’d expect to see a big What Is Topical e-commerce store like Amazon (DR 96) at the top of the search results for a product-focused keyword like this. However, a DR 23 site is ranked in second place, well above Amazon. Why is this? Possibly because is a site all about the topic of bikes.