Glossary
What is Topical authority?
Topical authority is how thoroughly a site covers a subject. Search engines tend to trust sites that cover a topic in depth over sites that touch it once.
Topical authority describes how well a website is established as a source on a particular subject. It's built by covering the topic broadly and deeply, with pages that answer the main questions and the specific ones, and link to each other.
Why it works
A site that has answered many related questions well gives search engines more evidence of expertise than a single article, however good. New pages on the topic also start with an advantage.
Building it
- Choose a topic you can genuinely speak on.
- Map its questions: a broad overview, then the specific ones. See topic clusters.
- Write pages for the specific questions (long-tail keywords) and link them to the overview.
- Keep going, and keep the pages up to date.
What it isn't
A single score, or something you can fake with volume. Many thin pages on a topic don't build authority; fewer, better ones do. See thin content.
Seovyn works this way by default: it keeps writing related, well-sourced articles on the topics your audience cares about, and links them together.
Related
- Topic clusterA topic cluster is a group of related pages: a broad pillar page on a subject, and detailed pages on its subtopics that all link back to it.
- Internal linkingInternal links are links from one page of your site to another. They help readers navigate and help search engines find pages and understand how they relate.
- E-E-A-TE-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's quality guidelines use to judge whether content deserves to rank.