The lead post in this series is Mastering Topical Authority: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your SEO.
If you’re reading these posts sequentially, I apologize for some of them sounding repetitive. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m building a topic cluster on the topic of “topical authority”, I used a topical mapping tool named AlsoAsked to generate a list of questions people have entered as search queries, and I’m writing a blog post for each one. Hence this title.
Jump ahead to:
Introduction
Weirdly, the question itself seems to demonstrate a lack of understanding of what topical authority is.
Asking how it works seems to imply it’s something you USE rather than something you DO.
But it’s something you DO.
Topical authority is a framework to help you publish better quality content.
So you want to be a recognized topic authority?
I’m guessing that if you’re reading this, you already know WHY this matters.
And in terms of HOW, there are two perspectives:
- How do you increase topical authority?
- How does it work?
As the title of this blog post states, this post is about the latter.
Topical authority is a framework
Which I guess kind of makes it something you use, which seemingly contradicts a statement I made earlier, but… you use it to guide your content development efforts and to publish better content.
So you use the framework to help you do something better, and the something is publishing.
Expertise is hard to fake
Many try. Many fail.
One of the mantras I live by is good writers need to be good learners.
You’ve got to be able to take complex concepts and explain them in terms others can understand.
So you either need to personally be an authority on the topic in question, or you need to write on behalf of people who are.
Topical authority and Google E-E-A-T
Google E-E-A-T is another framework to help you publish quality content. It’s a bit different from the topical authority framework, but it’s just a relevant.
So, how DOES topical authority work?
All of the above gels down to… topical authority (and Google E-E-A-T) help you publish better content.
That in a nutshell is how it works.
It’s not a ranking signal per se. But rather it guides you to do things that do create positive ranking signals for your content.
