How to build topical authority in SEO: A beginner's guide

What is topical authority in SEO?

Who do you call when you have a question about your finances?

What about if something goes wrong with your car?

Do you have a go-to person for local restaurant suggestions?

You probably think of these people as authorities in their respective topics. You go to them for varying types of advice because they’ve proven to know a lot about investment, or engines, or the local food scene.

This is called topical authority—and search engines look for it, too.

In SEO, topical authority is a measure of your site’s authority (expertise) on a given topic.

Just like you judge which of your friends or associates to contact with a given question, Google chooses which websites to surface based on how much authority each site has on the topic.

How does topical authority work?

While Google doesn’t publish their official formula for determining topical authority, it is continuously updating its algorithms to prioritize the most relevant, reliable, and authoritative content possible.

SEO experts tend to agree demonstrating topical authority requires a balance of:

1. Search rank data (e.g. number of relevant keywords, rank for relevant keywords)
2. Traffic data (traffic to pages from relevant keywords)

Topical authority is a cumulative metric, quantifying authority for your site as a whole—which means a single successful blog post isn’t enough to build real topical authority. Content across your entire library needs to be ranking (and converting) across the many search queries within a given topic.

Salesforce offers a great example of topical authority in SEO.

Type just about any search related to "CRM" into Google, and a Salesforce blog post is likely to be in #1 or #2 in SERP, ranging from “what’s a CRM system” to “CRM professional services” to “CRM for private schools”. And Salesforce produces high-quality content—direct, practical, accessible, thorough, and well matched with the search query that it’s winning.

Collectively, these blog posts cover a breadth and depth of subjects within the topic of “CRM”, which qualifies Salesforce as an authority on this topic in the eyes of the search engine.

How to build topical authority in SEO

The best way to show Google you’re an authority in a topic is to publish a variety of high-quality content pieces that demonstrate a breadth and depth of expertise (like our Salesforce example). Many content marketers achieve this by using topic clusters.

A topic cluster is a set of related content pieces centered around a single piece of pillar content that covers the broad topic, interlinked with cluster pieces that dive into more specific topics in depth.

1. Identify your pillar content topics

The first step of creating topic clusters is to identify a few broad pillar topics that can support a variety of cluster content pieces. There are plenty of places to find relevant topics:

• Your audience personas—What are their pain points? What are their jobs-to-be-done? What topics do they care about?
• Your website—What key phrases appear in your value value proposition, in customer testimonials, on your homepage, and in your blog? What’s in your product documentation?
• Product positioning and messaging materials—What phrases do you use to talk about your product? What category do you occupy? How do you want people to think about your product?
• Competitor websites—What key phrases do they use?
• Comparison sites—Review sites like G2 can be a good place to find language customers are using related to your products and competing products.

Create a list of topic ideas, then review keyword volume and difficulty to narrow down your best options. While volume is a simple measurement of the number of searches conducted for a specific term, competition is a more complex measurement that estimates how hard it will be to rank for a keyword.

Use this data to choose topics that are narrow enough to be relevant, but broad enough to support a little library of their own. For example, “content marketing” may be too broad for a new B2B content operations platform (and too difficult to rank for), but “content performance” could fit the bill.

Common tools for completing this step include SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz—but it’s easier in the ércule app.

Find pillar topic opportunities in the ércule app

1. Create a list of potential topics
2. Visit the Topic Explorer
3. Enter each topic into the search field

Be on the lookout for topics that:

• Generate a variety of related keywords
• Have decent keyword search volume and reasonable competition
• Your content already ranks for

2. Convert topics to keywords

You’ve identified relevant pillar topics, and each of these topics is broad enough to generate at least a handful of content pieces—but what should those pieces be? There are lots of ways to talk about (and search for) any given topic. Your job in this step is to document a bunch of them and evaluate how well they fit into your strategy.

For example, the pillar topic “content performance” might also be talked about in terms like:

• Content performance metrics
• How to measure content performance
• Content performance dashboard

Each of these keywords could yield a very different piece of content.

Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz can help you find keywords relevant to your priority topics—but it’s even easier in the ércule app.

Identify keyword opportunities in the ércule app:

1. Visit the Topic Explorer (again)
2. Enter the topic into the search field
3. Identify keywords relevant to your business and audience

Optionally, you can also add these keywords to a Topic Report to easily keep track of your performance against them.

3. Convert keywords to content pieces

Once you have a keyword list, use these keywords to brainstorm content ideas for each stage of the buyer’s journey. The idea here is to match up keywords to your buyer’s needs throughout their journey.

For example, an early stage content piece may introduce the reader to a problem with a piece like:

• 3 Content Performance Metrics You’re Probably Missing

A mid-stage piece could teach the reader how to solve the challenge with a piece like:

• How to Measure Content Performance for your CMO

And a later-stage content piece encourages readers to choose your solution to the challenge:

• How to Build a Content Performance Dashboard with ercule

Pro Tip:

Make sure you don’t have existing pages that rank well for your target keywords before creating new content. If you have existing content that ranks in the top two to three pages of search results, work to optimize your existing page instead.

One of the best aspects of the Topic Explorer in the ércule app is that it automatically surfaces related keywords your site already ranks for.

This prevents you from inadvertently creating new content that will cannibalize (steal traffic from) existing content.

4. Publish and interlink your content

Once you’ve created your pillar page and some supporting cluster pieces, it’s important to create internal links between pieces in your topic cluster. Your pillar page should link out to each cluster piece, and each cluster piece should link back to the pillar. Cluster pieces can also link to other cluster pieces as appropriate.

When possible, use anchor text for your links that includes the primary target keyword of the destination page.

Do NOT use the primary target keyword for a given content piece as anchor text linking to a different content piece—this tells Google that the destination page is a better resource for the term and will hurt your organic search performance.

You can find existing content to link to your new content pieces using Google. Just search for:

site:[your website URL] “keyword”

For example, if ercule published a new piece on content analytics, we could find linking opportunities by searching Google for:

site:www.ercule.co “content analytics”

The results page turns up any page on ercule.co that mentions “content analytics”, allowing us to easily add a link to the new post with that anchor text.

But the ércule app can help you find interlinking opportunities too.

Find interlinking opportunities in the ércule app.

1. Visit the Topic Explorer
2. Enter the topic of your new content into the search field
3. Toggle the results from Keywords to Pages
4. Review the existing page results for opportunities to link to your new content

Measure your topical authority

Voila—you created a topic cluster. You’re well on your way to establishing topical authority. But how can you tell if it’s working?

All of the data you need—search rank, impressions, clicks—can be found in Google Search Console. Integrating and synthesizing that data, however, requires a tool. Google Looker Studio can generate topic reports (though some engineering is required).

The ércule app makes it simple to measure topical authority.

Measure topical authority in the ércule app

1. Visit your Content Library
2. Enter the topic into the search field
3. Click to review performance for all pages with related content

In just three steps, you can easily see if your pages are getting views, as well as if they’re categorized as stars (pages with high traffic and good engagement).

Once you click into a content piece, you can review metrics like:

• Organic traffic
• All traffic
• Bounce rate
• Keyword performance

Build your topical authority with the ércule app

Building topical authority in SEO isn't a one-time effort—it's an ongoing strategy that requires careful planning, quality content creation, and consistent measurement of results. And topic clusters are one of the most effective ways to climb those SERP rankings.

While tools like Google Search Console can provide raw data for these exercises, and traditional SEO platforms offer keyword research capabilities, the ércule app streamlines the whole process.

From identifying pillar topics where you already have traction to finding keyword opportunities, planning content, creating internal linking strategies, and measuring your topical authority—ércule makes each step more intuitive and efficient.

Want to grow your topical authority? Start your trial today.