In the world of content marketing and SEO, we spend a lot of time thinking about topics. And in the future, that’s only going to increase. The way people search is changing and it may result in search engines relying more heavily on topical authority than keyword rankings. If you want your business to be successful, you are going to need to get ahead of this trend by optimizing your website for topical authority now—before it’s too late!
What Is Topical Authority?
There’s a lot of confusion about what topical authority is, and how it differs from other types of authority. Here’s the simple answer:
- Topical Authority is the ability to rank a topic.
- Domain Authority (DA) measures your overall search ranking abilities across all topics. If you have great DA, you’re able to rank well on multiple topics, not just one. For example, if you own “[domain]” then your DA will be high because people will trust you over any other website in their results. Your Domain Authority score doesn’t change as much as your Topical Authority score does over time—in fact, it may even increase quickly as new domains are created and link to yours!
- Page Authority (PA) measures how strong your specific pages are at ranking for certain terms within Google Search Results pages—similarly to how DA measures the strength of individual websites across broad topics or queries instead of focusing solely on individual URLs alone like PA does with its own indexing system.”
Why Will Topical Authority Matter in seo?
You may have heard a lot about topical authority in the past few years, but what is it? Simply put, it’s the ability to provide value to your audience by sharing information that’s relevant and interesting.
The concept of topical authority is important for two reasons:
- First, users are looking for answers on different topics before they search for anything else online. When someone has a question or something they want to know more about, they’re likely going to Google it first before doing anything else. This means you should have a strategy ready when you publish content so you can answer those questions immediately and provide high-quality answers that can be found easily when someone searches Google or other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo (you should check out our full list of best SEO tools here).
- Second., this helps build trust between you as an expert in your industry and your target audience because they’ll see how knowledgeable you are through all the work that goes into creating great content around topics related directly back to them!
Important Ranking Factors of a Topic Page
The ranking factors of a topic page are:
- Keywords
- Title
- Description
- Images
- Links (internal and external)
- Keyword density (the number of times the keywords appear in your content compared to the total number of words on that page)
- Site structure (e.g., hierarchy and navigation)
- Quality of content, including readability, length, grammar & spelling errors
- Quality of links pointing to the page from other sites in your industry or niche
- Quality of backlinks (links pointing to your site; most important for SEO)
- Quality of social media shares related to this topic
- Quality of user reviews related to this topic
How to Optimize Your Topic Page
- Use the right keywords. This is probably the most important thing you can do to be a topical authority in 2022. By using the right keywords, you’ll be able to get ranked higher than other sites on search engines, which means more traffic will come to your site.
- Use the right image or video thumbnail that matches your post’s topic (e.g., if you are writing about how to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse, use an image of someone planting tomatoes).
- Create a title for each blog post that includes one or two questions with easy answers (e.g., “What is cloud computing?”).
- Write a description of each blog post that summarizes the main points without giving away too much information—this should take less than 100 words and there should only be one paragraph in it (no more than three sentences).
- Make sure all internal links go back to relevant pages on your own site and don’t link out anywhere else until after reading this section!
Optimizing your topic pages can help you build topical authority, which will be important in the future.
Optimizing your topic pages can help you build topical authority, which will be important in the future.
A topical authority is an important part of SEO, brand recognition and trust, brand loyalty, brand awareness, and equity. You need to have it if you want to rank high on search results.
Conclusion
If you’re ready to dive into topical authority, there’s no time like the present. You’ll want to be prepared when it comes time to optimize your topic pages, so get started now!