Topical Authority

After you read this article you will learn about:

• What is topical authority? Topical cluster?
• How does domain authority differ from topical authority?
• Why websites should focus on building topical authority?
• Can you measure topical authority?
• Why do best SEO campaigns require building topical authority?
• How to build topical authority?

We will end this article with the most common authority-building mistakes.

Let’s start from the beginning!

What is Topical Authority?

Topical authority is website expertise on a particular topic or subject.

Topical authority building is a crucial website management and SEO practice.

Search engines can determine the level of your website’s importance to certain groups of keywords and search intents.

What is a Content Cluster?

A topic cluster or content cluster is one of the main methods for building topical authority on any particular subject.

You can learn more about this in our content clusters guide.

Topical Authority vs. Domain Authority

It boils down to

• Domain authority = backlinks
• Topical authority = content

Domain authority or domain rating is the rating that SEO tools tend to give each website or web page based on backlink count and backlink quality. 

Each SEO tool measures it a bit differently, so different tools give different ratings for websites.

Now the main difference between topical authority and domain authority is that domain authority aims at measuring the  backlink profile, while topical authority focuses on content quality and the count of high quality pages within a subject.

How Topical Authority Can Help with Your SEO?

Search engines analyze and rank content semantically. This means that website topics are much more important than keywords. 

Read our semantic SEO guide if you wanna learn more about this.

Simply put, search engines decide the order of websites in search results by comparing whole websites to each other, not just single pages.

This means websites with lots of good content on a topic will rank higher than those with just one page on the subject.

Become the Go-to Website in Your Niche!

While all of this might sound a bit complex at first, the idea is quite simple when we look at it from a searcher's perspective.

When searching for a solution, would you rather find expert advice or something written by a complete beginner?

The expert advice, of course!

That’s exactly what topical authority is all about.

Having a website that's the best in its subject, offers expert solutions and deep information.

For any business wanting a lot of organic traffic, being the top authority in their topic should be the goal.

Topical Authority is Part of Google’s Quality Criteria (EEAT)

You can learn more about this in our comprehensive Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) guide.

For now though, it’s enough to know that topical authority is both partof the most important content rating guidelines used by search engines:

• Does this website have experience in this subject?
• Are they experts on the subject matter?
• Does this industry agree that this website has authority on this subject?
• Can you trust this website in terms of factual content and goal honesty?

Topical Authority as Branding Goal

Semantic SEO requires you to create the best website on the subject or topics you want to rank for, which is much easier said than done.

But having high topical authority can have a few other huge upsides that are outside of SEO, one of which is branding.

Branding is what people are saying behind your back. . 

Well, topical authority is almost the same thing. 

If any website is the first place you think of for solving a problem or finding information, it means they're a top authority on that topic. 

Becoming such a go-to source is not just good for SEO, but also a smart long-term business and branding strategy.

How to Measure Topical Authority?

Google didn’t give us a precise definition nor a way to measure topical authority. However, they did explain how they rate content quality site-wide based on their rater guidelines. 

Therefore, just like with branding, it’s hard to measure topical authority - but you can tell that it works when you see it.

That being said, I will give you one way to “get a feeling for topical authority” if you are an Ahrefs user.

First, you will need to create a huge list of keywords within one topic, for this example, I just wrote everything that came to mind for Webflow. 

By no means my list was complete; it only had a few dozen keywords.

The bigger the list you make, the more accurate the results will be. We would need hundreds if not thousands of keywords to create a list for “sites with topical authority in Webflow”.

In Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, if you input multiple keywords separated by commas, you can analyze the traffic share for different domains. 

This feature shows how much traffic each website gets for those specific keywords. 

By looking at the traffic share for domains, you get an insight into which websites are most successful in attracting visitors for those search terms, giving you a better understanding of the competitive landscape and topical authority in that subject area.

We see different percentages of which domain gets which % of traffic for all these keywords combined. 

Obviously, in this example, Webflow had 97% topical authority (traffic) for keywords I used, but we can also see other competitors with smaller traffic share within the same topical cluster.

It should come as no surprise that Webflow is the informational authority on the “subject of Webflow”. 

But if you pick your own smaller niche and reflect that in the keyword list, you will start to see “topical authority competitors” within that topic.

Building Topical Authority

Before the 2013 Hummingbird algorithm update, search engines relied on lexical search. 

This meant that search engines didn’t know either what the user meant by using keywords or what meaning the individual web page conveyed.

After 2013, search became semantic, and topical authority became an important factor for SEO.

That’s because search engines can now understand the actual meaning behind searched phrases and can evaluate your web page by analyzing the meaning, not only the words on it.

How to Build Topical Authority?

When you create web pages around the same topic and interlink them, you start building up topical authority on a particular subject.

A common misconception is that it only applies to articles inside your blog. No!

Topical authority is about your whole website! Offers, services, features, informational content, everything combined!

To understand why that’s the case, make sure to read our extensive guide on search intent.

But for now, let’s dig into actionable steps on how to build your topical authority.

Cover Whole Topics, not Keywords

When researching what website you should build to reach your business goals and planning your content strategy, you should not focus on individual keywords and how often people search for them.

Instead, focus on the overarching topics of these keywords. A topic can rank for hundreds of keywords.

Not to lie here, looking at keyword metrics can be a great way to see whether there’s demand for your business. 

Knowing average conversion rates and checking estimated traffic numbers for your competition is a great way to know how big of a website you need, what quality it has to be, and which ROI to expect.

But from here, it’s all about using that information as a guide for understanding your topics and target audience needs.

Broaden Your Target Audience

Ideally, we'd want websites to attract only our main target audience for better business results and ROI. 

However, we can't control who searches for what online or their reasons.

They might be serious customers or just curious browsers unlikely to convert. 

That's why, in creating a topically relevant website, it's important to build a resource that’s useful for everyone, not just those who directly bring profits. 

Fun fact: Some of my clients have leveraged this broader appeal to adapt their business models, often leading to increased profits.

Topical Maps

Topical maps are very similar to “visual sitemaps” but they focus on determining topics, subtopics, pages, headings, and overall content in terms of hierarchy, length, and breadth.

To give a real-life example, at the time of writing this sentence, I am writing content for the 73rd page within the same topic to establish topical authority on Webflow SEO.

We still have metadata and semantic relationship information (taxonomy) ready for 76 more pages. However I know that at least 2/3 or even more of those not-written-yet pages might never get published, due to cannibalization, rejected topics, and other reasons.

But before we even started, we spent quite a few weeks defining a topical map for this “Webflow SEO” part of the Finsweet website. It looked something like this…

It looks messy, I know, but then we turned it into a metadata database that had all the slugs, titles, relationship tags, and other relevant information in it.

Now, I simply open the next item, use a ready-made document with a CMS Collection field template, and start researching and writing.

I also use the same database to interlink pages. Yes, to internally link to pages that don’t exist yet, but they will when we publish the topical cluster.

Pillars and Clusters

For a detailed understanding, check our full guide on content pillars and clustering. Here's a brief summary:

• Each main topic should have a 'pillar' page providing a broad overview.
• This pillar page should link to 'cluster' pages, each covering a subtopic in more detail.
• Cluster pages should link back to the pillar page and to other relevant subtopics.
• This structure helps establish topical authority, as both search engines and users follow these links for more information.
• How and where you link between pages helps search engines and users understand the context and relationship between different topics on your site.

Internal Links are Very Important!

Internal linking, especially contextual internal links are crucial for topical authority. 

That’s because they help both crawlers and users  notice relationships between different pages on your site.

Cite Your Resources

A common misconception is that you have to only link to your own pages, but that’s not true if you truly want to be helpful to the user. 

You should externally link to other web pages as often as it makes sense!

Linking to other websites is a great way to help visitors find the information they need, crawlers love that too! 

Linking to reputable pages within your content, allows you to show what information you trusted and relied on.

It also helps both users and crawlers justify any claims you make within your content, because you linked to the source that proves that claim.

Create the Best Content Out There!

It's important to create the best content that thoroughly covers your topic in a way that is most helpful to your audience.

The emphasis here is on “helpful to your users”. 

It’s important to remember that each page serves a purpose and should not have “unnecessary fluff” around it.

If you are making a page about a very specific subtopic for advanced users, you don’t need to explain the fundamentals. That would just waste the user’s time. 

That’s why making the best content is tricky, and understanding search intent helps a lot!

Get Experts to Write For You 

Another important thing to mention is that you can’t fake authority in topical authority. Don’t forget that search engines will compare your whole website to other websites out there.

You can learn more about it in our E-E-A-T guide, though keep in mind that it’s easy to spot lower-quality content if it has not been created by or with an expert in this industry.

Meaning authors with provable credentials on your website can help you show that content is high quality and created or vetted by a real expert.

Share for Social Clout!

Authority also comes from other websites within the same topic linking to you.

It also comes based on the traffic you get and user behavior inside your website.

Social media or other engagement proves authority. Especially if you have a big audience, and loads of people show up on your website!

Keep that in mind when growing your website.

Common Topical Authority Mistakes

Topical authority might seem like a big and complex subject, but really, it’s as simple as…

Be the best in your niche.

However, there are a few things that make establishing topical authority hard.

Keyword Cannibalization!

Avoid keyword cannibalization by ensuring each web page covers unique aspects of a topic and avoiding similar headings on different pages.

In UX design there's the concept of atomic design where everything is divided into ions, atoms, molecules, organisms, and species.

Funny enough, the same can be said for topical authority. Determining how big or small each part of your topic (web page) is the hardest task out there!

That’s because if you repeat yourself too often, especially if you use identical or very similar headings on different pages, you might cannibalize your own content.

Keyword cannibalization is an issue on any website when two or more web pages have been created for the same search intent. If that happens, search engines won’t rank either of the two pages as high.

Why? Because if you don’t know which page is the best one for this subject, how can users or search engines decide it?

Make sure to pay attention to this while creating your content.

Avoiding Information Overloading and Underloading in Topical Content 

While it’s hard to advise on how to avoid keyword cannibalization, there is one rule that you should think about when establishing topical authority.

It’s based on user intention analysis and relies on determining what users might know or not know when they land on your page.

For example, if you create a beginner guide, you should use simple language, and only cover topics on a higher level.

On a page that was created with industry experts in mind, you shouldn’t waste their time by explaining the basics.

Becoming an Authority Takes Time

Topical authority is a great concept that explains SEO as a whole. Best websites should have the highest rankings if they are truly the best.

Now, in reality, having the best website on day one of its release is impossible. But it’s possible to plan, grow, expand, update, and improve your site to get there!