The lead post in this series is Mastering Topical Authority: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your SEO.
If you’re reading the posts in this series sequentially, I apologize (again) for the repetition you’re seeing.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I used the Topical Mapping tool AlsoAsked to create a list of questions people search for, and I’m creating a topic cluster by answering each one in a blog post. However, some of the questions are similar to others, which is resulting in some posts being similar to others.
Jump ahead to:
You build authority with content through publishing
Research
Research includes both selecting good topics, by which I mean topics that people go to search engines to ask about, as well as researching the topics and subtopics themselves.
One of the mantras I live by in this era of Content Marketing and Topical Authority is that writers need to be good learners.
If you’re not already an authority for the topics you’re publishing on, you need to have access to one (or more), or you need to become one.
Writing, videoing, etc
These days, content is not just the written word, so what I say below applies to all formats.
However, if you use video, in addition to where the video is hosted (YouTube for example) publish the videos to your website as blog posts, one post per video, and beneath the video put the full text transcript of the video.
Search engine spiders are getting better at turning audio (such as the audio in a YouTube video) into text, but as they’re not quite “there” yet, your putting the transcript below the video helps the search engine determine what the video is about.
Hit “Publish”, often
At the risk of making a ridiculous statement, the way you build authority with content is to build authority with content.
You publish. Regularly and frequently.
Build content in clusters
A topic cluster is nothing more than a set of articles, blog posts, videos, etc that are on related aspects of an overall topic, and link back and forth to each others.
The links between the various posts or article signal to the search engines that these posts or articles are related.
External validation: backlinks and mentions
While links are no longer THE ranking signal, and maybe they’re not even in the top three now, they still matter.
However, other forms of external validation also matter. Specifically brand mentions.
Pro actively pursuing acquiring backlinks and brand mentions helps you build authority with content faster.
But, these days promoting content via social media has become much less effective, since almost everyone is doing it.
What works better these days is active, but not excessively commercial or sales focused, participation in online forums where your audience hangs out.
Monitor and measure (analytics)
All you really need here is Google Analytics and Google Search Console, but describing how you use them to monitor for which posts are most popular or attract the most visitors from organic search is beyond the scope of this post.
However, you can find a lot of such tutorials on the Internet.
I’m also a fan of Microsoft Clarity, a free heatmap tool that allows you see recordings of people scrolling and clicking on pages on your website.
And keep at it
And the last key ingredient is persistence.
Your efforts to build topical authority with content is never ending.
Why? Because search engine rankings are relative. While you’re working to boost your topical authority and search engine rankings, so is everyone else.
So you’ve got to keep at it.
