The lead post in this series is Mastering Topical Authority: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your SEO.
These are test links that will be removed once the testing is done: link1, link2, link3, link4, link5.
Building topical authority is not magic, it’s work.
And in writing this it occurs to me that the word “strategies” in the title being plural is not right. Everyone seems to do this the same way.
Know your stuff, explain it well, and structure/format content about it to help search engine spiders find it.
Building topical authority requires deep and broad knowledge of the topic in question, consistent publishing of in-depth comprehensive posts and articles on various aspects of the topic, and persistence.
It’s not the case that persistence is THE most important ingredient, topic knowledge is.
But without persistent publishing, the search engines will not pick up that you are in fact a topic expert.
Jump ahead to:
Building topical authority requires going deep
Another way to say this is to niche down.
No site is or can be an authority on everything, unless you have a massive team of writers who individually are experts in different topic areas.
Most websites are not like that. So choose your topic based on your actual expertise.
Keyword research still matters
To help your content be found, you want to answer questions people are actually asking.
While we often call this process “keyword research” I prefer the term “market research”.
What do people actually want to know?
There are a number of good tools (Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, AnswerThePublic, PeopleAlsoAsk, etc) that can help you here.
Create a content outline
I’ll talk more about this soon, but this relates to the concepts of “topic clusters” and “pillar posts“.
Basically, create your topic cluster structure in the form of an outline where each item in the outline is a future blog post.
Again, what matters most here is for each blog post to provide an answer to something people are actually searching for.
Commit to a publishing schedule
Once a week, three times a week, daily, etc.
Create your schedule, commit to it, then meet it.
Segue: I believe this is the main reason why ex-journalists make the best content marketers. They are used to writing to deadlines.
Publish, publish, publish
You’ve got to create your outline, structure your topic clusters, etc, etc.
But once that’s in place, you’ve got to publish per the schedule you set previously.
If publishing new content is something you get to when you can, building topical authority will take forever (for all practical purposes).
Create topic clusters
Yes, I said this earlier, but it bears repeating. Maybe even over and over and over again.
Like all topically relevant links from quality content, internal links matter.
Your pillar posts must link to the other posts in the topic cluster. Every post in the topic cluster must link back to the pillar post (or posts). And when appropriate the various posts in the cluster must link across to each other.
Those links provide signals to the search engine robots that all those posts are related.
Publish, publish, publish
I know, I just said this. But it’s so important I may say it more.
Promote your content
Generally people use social media for this, but the key question to ask yourself is where do they people who care about what you’re writing about hang out?
Facebook? LinkedIn? X/Twitter? Mastodon? Etc?
Finding your tribe online is not as easy as some people claim.
In theory this is not strictly necessary, as when you publish long enough your people will start to find you through organic search.
But since topically relevant links DO matter, finding your tribe online and engaging with them can help them learn of your content sooner, which helps build topically relevant links sooner, which is good.
Monitor, measure, adjust
By which we mean “analytics”.
Google Analytics, even the new one, is fine for most of us.
It allows you to know which posts are most popular, which in turn tells you what topics are resonating most with your readers.
The specifics of HOW to setup Google Analytics is beyond the scope of this post, but there is no shortage of such instructions on the Internet.
In closing
I’m very much reminded of the Nike tagline “Just do it!”.
Your high quality comprehensive in-depth content covering various aspects of a topic in detail is never going to write itself.
Someone has to put in the work.