Topical Authority: So skaliert SEO am allerbesten!
You will learn what Topical Authority is, how to build it and which
content strategies will help you. Have fun! My name is Alexander Rus
and SEO is my bread and butter. On this channel we chat
about SEO and content marketing. If you want to learn how you can sustainably acquire
customers through your website, then subscribe to this channel right now. What
is Topical Authority? Topical authority is a measure of authority built through proven expertise and trust
in a specific area. To put it simply in the context of SEO: the more content a website contains on
a specific topic, the more likely it is that
the website will be perceived by Google as a trustworthy source of information on a specific
topic.
This topic comes up again and again on our channel. We also like to call it a niche library
or the first port of call in your niche. But the exciting thing is:
Why should I deal with Topical Authority,
or what does Topical Authority bring? Let's start at the beginning again:
Google wants to be a satisfying search engine.
When people google something, they get a result that satisfies their query
and keeps them coming back so they (Google)
can sell that attention to advertisers.
As a result, Google wants to show its users the best possible
content from the most credible sources. That means Topical Authority, if you do it
properly, will increase your organic Google traffic. But it also has extremely cool side effects.
Namely, when you answer all of your audience's questions and concerns throughout the customer
journey, you naturally build trust. Everyone knows this old concept with the 7
touchpoints – I think the concept is already out of date because it
definitely works differently these days. But for everyone who may still be new to
digital marketing: Most people believe that if I run a Google Ad for a
keyword and the user comes to my site, then he already has the credit card in his hand
and buys a product immediately . Or if I rank #1 for a keyword, that's when he comes
to my site the first time and then he buys right away. No one ever. Because people are much more like that – even if they
're already searching a keyword, which implies they want to buy something now – then they're never going to buy
fresh from a vendor the first time on the site.
That's not how it works.
But you want — along their research (which
is ultimately the customer journey) you want to see them again and again and then at the
end when they're really ready to buy, they have their credit card in hand, then you want to
be there and then you sell them What. And that's where Topical Authority helps because
you cover all questions and all concerns. And for all those who now know better,
let's look at the whole thing in the context of E-A-T, i.e. expertise,
authority & trustworthiness. There is a very, very extensive
guide on our website that explains it again in detail.
But here too: Instead of writing any
content on any topic in isolation, I want to publish a lot of content on my website
that expresses expertise, authority and trustworthiness.
That's exactly what Google wants. That is even what they specifically write in the
Quality Rater Guidelines, namely: The user lands on the page and not
only his first question is answered, but also the follow-up questions, because the
website simply has all this content.
Very important, because
some hyped SEOs have now claimed that and "oh my god,
Topical Authority is a game changer!" I've never heard such nonsense.
This is a fundamental concept of SEO, which has been around since the beginning of SEO.
It's not a game changer, everyone does it too. Topical Authority doesn't mean you can
now magically rank without backlinks. The authority component is still important. Now what are such interesting
effects regarding “I want SEO results from Topical Authority”? Typically, when there's such extremely cool
"hockey stick curves," like this, it's a Topical Authority story. So an example, which we will
look at very briefly here, is: We have already generated a lot of content in advance, but rather bottom of the funnel. But
nevertheless we already have a page that was very, very topically relevant, and
it also had authority and so on, and then we covered topics with high authority
. And due to the existing high topical authority, everything ranked very quickly and
you can then scale traffic very quickly.
Which from my point of view is the more interesting
effect if you have an online shop, where you mainly rank the homepage
and the shop category pages. For those sites too, it can make sense to build
a how-to section or blog section (whatever you call it) because
what happens is when you have a small, not-so-big brand with not that much
authority, then you can do a lot much to make up for in relevance. And what you then do is you build
an additional advice area – of course you will write the shop category pages first
and so on, but with this advice area not only do the advices get more traffic,
but the additional topical authority also increases the shop category pages
and gets them more traffic. So now you know:
Topical Authority sucks. Now let's look at how
we build Topical Authority.
Now these are all concepts that are
nested together, but I know from experience that some people are
more comfortable with one concept than the other. I'm going to present this point by point now, there's a
lot of overlap and a lot follows from the next, but just so you understand:
this is how you build topical authority. Basically, point number 1: Consider the entire customer journey during your first
keyword research.
That doesn't mean you're building the content funnel
from the top down now – you always build it from the bottom up so of course you build
the commercial pages first so you generate revenue and so on
because then you can do that too better finance additional content. But keep in mind
that ideally you're building all of this so that you become the niche library in your field
, or the first port of call. How such a keyword research can look like.
Just as an example: And there's a super-topical
video where I show you again how to do good, basic,
basic keyword research. It's not rocket science, lots of common sense,
and the cool thing is, keyword research not only tells you,
"Oh, what pages do I need to build?" it also tells you,
"What kind of demand is this? What do they want People?" And so on. This can also help you in
product development. Number 2:
Analyze and cover the fundamental building blocks or entities in
your niche. In other words,
look at what the fundamental content building blocks of your niche are.
Whole Simply put, what would be
the basic building blocks of content in SEO? That would be something like "search engine optimization",
the term that implies "What is SEO?". OnPage optimization, OffPage optimization,
title tag, meta description, etc . All these fundamental terms that come up again and again
when you deal with SEO , you
ideally want to cover them on your site if you want to build topical authority. If you're thinking, ok, where do
I have to start? in my niche? What you do in a classic way is:
First you look at which pages Wikipedia has in your niche,
and then which terms are prominent. So if we now look at Wikipedia for
search engine optimization, then we see: Ok, I know now: In order to build up Topical Authority, I will incorporate the term
search engine optimization.
But I'll also maybe cover web search engine,
search engine ranking, vertical search engines, search engine marketing, web crawlers,
meta elements, link popularity, backlinks, link building, etc. to really build
my topical authority. If you are still
interested in the topic, there is a video about entities where I explain in detail how to
identify the entities in your niche. Number 3, also a classic concept:
Build themed clusters. What is a theme cluster? I'm not showing a graphic here because a graphic is more confusing,
I think, than reality. This is the guide to "Keyword", this is a
fundamental building block, this is the pillar. That said, a key topic in SEO
is keyword – I think that makes sense. It's all about keywords. And now we have all content around
keywords. And that is search intention, that is, what the user wants to achieve with a keyword,
keyword research, keyword difficulty, keyword density, keyword stuffing, long-tail keywords.
There's more I can think of, but we haven't had time to produce that content yet
, but that's a cluster of topics.
You have a central theme and
then the specific themes. Keyword is super general. And then there are
all these subtopics that I cover with it. The topic is also called hub and spoke.
Then it looks like you have a short-tail keyword, i.e. a keyword with
a general intent, that’s the hub. And then you have Spokes on specific
stuff, namely keyword research, how do I find the right keywords. Then Keyword Difficulty, how difficult
is it to rank for a keyword. Then Keyword Density, what density of
keywords a text should have, and so on.
And if you build your website like this, it's of
course a dream for search engines and for the algorithm, because it's super easy
to make semantic connections. And the user lands, for example, on the general topic and
then gets all their questions answered perfectly. If you want to know more about topic clusters
, there is of course a current video in which I explain exactly how to set up
topic clusters professionally. Number 4: Maximize your relevance
through your website structure.
And as you can see, all
these topics are connected. I always prefer to use
my supermarket example. A supermarket is incredibly logically structured. Different departments,
things like fruit, beverages, meat, dairy, vegetables and so on.
Everything is always quite logical, that is, when I go to the produce department,
there are tomatoes in the produce department. If I want a coke,
I go to the beverage department , soft drinks or soft drinks,
whatever, and that's where I find the coke. This means that if you build your website like
this, then you are already doing everything right towards Topical Authority. And how
you communicate that clearly to the algorithm is how you do your directory structures
, how you do your URL structure, and then how you link everything internally.
There's a video about it,
that has a cool name, that means "Relevance is trumps"
and I explain exactly how you can save yourself
a part of the link building by extreme maximization of relevance . And everyone knows link building is
pretty exhausting and expensive and tedious. So. Number 5:
Build your pages logically. That means we've now talked about website
structure, now let's talk about page structure or page structure, that
is, the structure of a single page.
One concept you need to understand here in
order to write for the web and simply be successful at SEO is the
principle of the inverted pyramid. That means, at the beginning there is the
important information and then it gets more and more detailed downwards
only for people who are super interested, so that the normal user gets his questions answered as
quickly as possible. The whole thing is nicely structured
with subheadings. We did a very extensive series
about SEO texts, where I explain all these texts exactly how to build a page. You can
break it down quite a bit, namely even at the level of paragraphs or individual sentences,
because Google, for example, is also concerned with giving you any featured snippets or
short answers in the SERPs, i.e. via "Users ask too" or featured snippets .
And since it's very simple, how do you set it up? The questions users have, and
below that is the answer in a paragraph.
If you just want to do something for the algorithm
, no matter what level (site level or page level), everything has to be crystal
clear so that the algorithm understands it. Number 6: Write with a very, very
high information density. As some know, Google is
now incredibly good at interpreting content and assessing whether it
is relevant to this search query or not. For those who don't know it yet:
The Cloud Natural Language API. You have some problem today,
I copied that in there ages ago, but it's still loading. In any case, Google can
analyze which entities it is relevant to, etc.
And what I mean by information density: If possible, especially with
your information content, avoid something like "OnPage optimization", simply something typically found
in a glossary is – do without fluff, because gibberish naturally dilutes
the relevance and information density. For the algorithm, everything always revolves
around relevance or proximity to the topic. They then call it salience: How relevant
are you to that one thing. There are tools
you can use to analyze that. Here I analyzed our article on
"SEO Costs". And then you see which entities this is relevant to. SEO, company, search engine optimization,
budget, SEO agency, website, price, clients… I don't think it gets much more relevant. And
I think you understand what is meant.
If you now have a lot of fluff and ramblings
in there, then it's incredibly difficult for the algorithm to determine who
this content/text is really relevant to versus it's all super compressed. And by compressed
I don't mean short content – very important, because otherwise it's like "oh, we need
short content in SEO." – Long content, long-form content still performs by far
the best, and everyone shows it Study. So number 7, the final point on how we
build Topical Authority is of course: Get highly relevant links. We have now built so much content for our
website and in principle this point is no longer quite part of it, but
I want to say it in this context anyway. If you want to rank better for anything related to
SEO, then ideally you want to acquire links from other SEO experts who say, "Oh my
god, look at this content on theirs!" because that's a vote or a at the end of the day
Recommendation for you that may not just come from an authority, but
maybe from a highly relevant authority.
And now, to wrap things up, we wanted to
talk very briefly about which content strategies
actually promote Topical Authority? And which content strategies ensure that you actually automatically
build up topical authority? And yes, there are several things, but I have worked out the three most important ones
from my point of view. At the end of the day, SEO is all about
demand, and every demand has patterns.
That's why you always get
some search patterns with SEO, such as when you
think of booking.com now: Booking.com, the whole page is structured according to
search patterns, namely "hotel + region", "hotel + place", "star rating + hotel +
location", "what a vacation + location" and so on. When you understand that there are search patterns in every niche
, you also understand how to build topical authority. And then
you will be successful in SEO anyway. What are the three content strategies
that I want to briefly introduce. Firstly, glossaries. This lends itself to definition content and,
like I said, building block entities. What is an extremely good template? For example ryte's wiki where they just built
a huge glossary where all topics – ok not all topics but many – the
most important topics are covered. And for each mini-entity, they built their own page.
For example, they built this page for “Customer Centricity” . And if you
look at it, these sites all get tons of traffic and they're kind of like a
niche library – quite a cool concept.
Then number 2 is simply advisor. Guides or blog articles, whatever , it's more about advice,
showing processes, whatever. A good example of this
might be Evergreen Media. Our guide looks like this: "SEO basics": What is SEO?, KPIs, checklist, strategy, tips, what are the
current trends, WordPress SEO. "Content marketing": content strategy, content marketing strategy,
writing SEO texts, content hub, … you see, we cover everything systematically. That means, ultimately, if you
land on our site about content marketing , we'll answer all of your
content marketing questions. And number 3, and
online shops simply have this huge advantage, are simply filter category pages or shop product category pages
– whatever you call it. Of course, the focus is always on
products, but what you always do with an online shop – you sort
it into product categories. Then, according to what properties do
you filter categories, according to brands, according to whatever – according to all possible
attributes and that's how you build it automatically … An online shop is usually – well, we have an exception right now,
I'm dealing with them today spoken, so not everyone does it that way – but 99% of
online shops basically have a not so bad structure and already have
topical authority in certain areas.
I don't want to praise people too highly either,
because it's usually not that good after all, but that's why the shop concept
works so well, because you have… Let's just take a
classic example: Zalando. It's super structured. Women: there are all the products that
Zalando carries in the women's area. Women > Clothing > Dresses And everything is beautifully textured.
You see anyway, then trousers for women: chinos, cloth trousers, leggings, leather trousers; that is, the structure is already
fully Topical Authority-like. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Feel free to write me a comment and maybe other concepts that help
to understand and build Topical Authority. I'm always happy
when I've forgotten something. And otherwise, thank you very much for
watching and see you next time. Bye!.
