Author: Maeva Cifuentes
If you were searching for personal finance advice online, you’d discover content from (or quoting) Warren Buffet, who’s written shareholder letters, given countless interviews, and published articles about investment strategies and market insights. But if you wanted advice on how to deal with your dog’s fleas, you’d more likely take advice from the blog of a local veterinarian.
Investing | Dog care |
Warren Buffet is widely known as one of the most successful investors of all time, with his own holding company outperforming the S&P 500 over the long term. Plus, he has a wide body of publications and public appearances speaking on investment. | The local vet likely has over eight years of education on animal health and clinical studies, as well as practical experience in the field. And if they publish a lot about it, caring pet owners will know and follow the local vet. |
Even if they both published content about one another’s respective topics, Google is more likely to prioritize investment content from Warren Buffet and pet care content from the local vet.
This is topical authority.
Not only do people prefer to consume content from someone that is an authority on a topic, Google prefers to serve that same content to them.
Building topical authority can help you rank higher and faster, but it’s not the right choice for all businesses. In this article, I’ll help you navigate whether it’s right for your brand (or clients’ brands) and how you can measure and build your own topical authority to succeed in search.
Table of contents:
What is topical authority in SEO?
Topical authority is the extent to which a website is an expert on a given topic. If you have high authority in a topic, all your pages on that topic are likely to rank higher than websites that have less authority regarding that topic (all other considerations being equal).
And, the quality of your website’s creators and contributors are just as important as the quality of the content on your website. Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines even says, “If the website is not the primary creator of the MC (Main Content), it’s important to research the reputation of the content creator as well.” The guidelines use the word ‘creator’ 146 times and often interchangeably with the website. It also warns quality raters that reputation research is required at all steps.
So, authoritative, experienced authors are a key part of the topical authority equation.
In many of Google’s communications to SEOs, it tells us that credibility is what we should prioritize. Its E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) framework provides SEOs with a slew of guidelines on how to make content more credible.
In the aforementioned search quality guidelines, Google defines ‘authoritativeness’ as “the extent to which the content creator or the website is known as a go-to source for the topic.”
What the examples in the intro have in common is experience and prolificness. For SEO practitioners, that means you can build authority by consistently publishing expert content on a specific topic, both on your own website and on other reputable websites and content platforms.
TL;DR: If you want to rank well for a specific topic, you need to publish a lot of pages about that topic for Google to take you seriously.
When is topical authority important?
Not all businesses want to commit to building topical authority—and, not all of them have to.
Oftentimes, businesses pursue topical authority because they operate in highly competitive verticals, so every advantage matters. Brands and SEOs working with clients in these sectors need to know that it can take a heavy resource investment (that’s also tricky to attribute) to generate topical authority that lifts your brand’s rankings in search results.
This is because building topical authority requires you to publish a lot of content around a topic, without it necessarily being content that immediately converts.
So for resource-sensitive businesses, you might struggle to make sense of spending $1000 on a blog post about ‘The History of Beer Brewing’ when you could spend it on a ‘Best Beer Brewing Kit’ landing page.
There are some reasons why you might not need to publish about every possible angle around your topic:
Your audience doesn’t need to be educated on the topic to buy (for example, in impulse purchases like fast fashion).
The product or service has a short sales cycle, making long-form content less necessary, (e.g., concert tickets).
The topic is extremely niche and competition is very low (in this case, you want to check whether investing in SEO in the first place is necessary for your business).
SEO is just a nice-to-have and not a full-on revenue and brand strategy. In this case, you probably don’t need to invest so much of your resources across the customer funnel (illustrated in the example graphic above).
You aren’t struggling to rank your ‘money pages’ in the top three positions and you can make money through search without people needing to know you as an expert.
However, there are scenarios where you have very little chance of succeeding through organic search if you don’t have topical authority:
You are competing in a highly competitive industry with well-established players, like many SaaS verticals.
You provide a B2B product or service, where you’re selling to a buying committee rather than a consumer, with a more complex decision-making process.
Your ‘money keywords’ are highly competitive and you can’t seem to get in the top three positions no matter what you do.
Long story short, you don’t need to publish about the [history of t-shirts] and [best fabric for a t-shirt] if you can rank [womens white t-shirt] and get people to buy directly from that page.
Save yourself the money and effort.
But, if you want any chance of ranking in the top three for [affiliate marketing], for example, you can count on it being a challenging journey of publishing high-quality content fervently around all potential angles of affiliate marketing for years to come.
Is topical authority a measured Google ranking factor?
Nobody is sure whether Google actually has a measure for authority or not.
In the above-mentioned search quality evaluator guidelines, Google only mentions authoritativeness 10 times. On the other hand, it mentions trust 177 times. So, while you can get a pretty clear idea of what trust means to Google and how it can tell if you’re trustworthy, there’s no clear indication of whether it measures topical authority, and if so, how.
In May 2023, Google published a blog post about a topic authority system:
“Publishers looking for success with topic authority should do exactly what their publications would normally do: provide great coverage about the areas and topics they know well. Such work should naturally align with what our topic authority system measures and with our general guidance about creating helpful, people-first content.” — Jen Granito, Group Product Manager, Search at Google
However, this blog post seems to be specific to SEO for news websites and newsy queries, rather than normal businesses or publishers trying to use SEO to grow.
There are many other instances where Google has specifically and openly stated that it doesn’t have an authority score embedded in the algorithm. For example, in this video, John Mueller, senior search analyst at Google, said, “From my point of view, we don’t have anything like a website authority score.”
Yet, the May 2024 Google Search internal documentation leaks revealed that there was indeed a site authority feature.
That said, nothing in the leak showed weights or confirmed that these features were actually included in the current algorithm. It’s impossible to tell whether they are used at all and, if so, how.
So, we don’t know whether Google’s algorithm can actually gauge authority, and whether it directly uses it when ranking pages.
However, websites with higher topical authority (measured via a proprietary topical authority score—more on that below) gained traffic 57% faster than websites with low topical authority, and that high topical authority increased the percentage of pages that got their first click within three weeks of publishing, according to a study by Graphite.
I’ve seen this firsthand with Hotjar, a former client. Initially, the client had thousands of pages targeting UX designers. When we published content for this audience, it would often rank in the top two pages within 1–2 days.
Later, the client wanted to target product managers, so we began publishing content on product management. Since there was no existing content for this audience, it took a couple of weeks for the new content to start being indexed and ranking.
Despite having a huge brand and one of the strongest possible domain ratings (Ahrefs’ proprietary metric), this content took a couple weeks for Google to index and rank after publishing—a testament to the power of topical authority.
How SEOs measure topical authority
Can you quantitatively measure topical authority?
While there is no official measurement of topical authority (as far as Google wants to share), there are ways you can attempt to measure yours.
If I were to create a framework for measuring topical authority, I’d look at two things:
Topical share of voice
Number of mentions from other relevant sources on the topic
Topical share of voice
I define topical share of voice as your visibility across all keywords/subtopics of a given broader topic compared to your competitors.
Let’s say you want to build topical authority around the topic of home brewing beer.
In Ahrefs (which I’ll use for this example because it provides share of voice), you can see that there are about 238 clusters related to home beer brewing with over 30,000 in monthly search volume.
If you want to build authority on this topic, you could start by creating content to build out that cluster, tracking your share of voice across all the keywords in the cluster. The more keywords from that cluster you rank in the top three SERP positions, the better.
To monitor the visibility of a set of keywords, you can add them to Ahrefs Rank Tracker:
Set up a project.
Click on “+Add keywords.”
Add the keywords from your topic cluster.
Click on “Add keywords.”
Navigate to your Overview report to review the tracked keywords.
Share of voice (SOV) and market share are strongly correlated. Studies show that for every 10% growth in market share, advertising brands have a corresponding 6% growth in share of voice. This means that, to hit your market share goals, you should aim for a share of voice that is slightly higher than your target market share. For example, if your goal is a 3% market share, you should aim for around a 5% share of voice.
In Ahrefs’ keyword tracker tool, you can compare your share of voice for your specific keywords against your main competitors.
There isn’t much data available on benchmarking your SOV percentage. What a good SOV percentage is depends on many factors. The industry, your competitors, your keyword strategy, local vs. global focus, etc. all play a role in what percentage can be considered a ‘strong’ share.
A good rule of thumb is to align your SOV goals with your market share goals. What’s a ‘good’ market share for a company of your size in your industry? A similar rate is probably good for share of voice.
Number of mentions from other relevant sources on the topic
If nobody has ever wanted to quote you or hear your opinion about a topic, are you really an expert on it?
If you want to build a business, would you rather take advice from a successful serial entrepreneur that you’ve heard about from reputable sources, or a random person who told you they ‘know how to run a business’?
If you didn’t personally know either of them, you’d probably trust the entrepreneur who’s been more abundantly quoted and celebrated in the press, rather than take chances on the unknown.
That’s essentially what Google does. It’s essentially saying, “If other websites that talk about brewing beer are citing this person, they must think they’re an expert on that topic. So I also think they’re an expert on that topic.”
You can keep a Google Alert on to get notified of publications mentioning your brand, or use social listening tools like Hootsuite or Brandwatch.
How to build topical authority and choose your topics
The idea behind topical authority is that if you want to rank easily about a given topic, you want to publish a lot of helpful content about that topic.
If you have a gardening website, and you have a large library of content around permaculture, perennial flowers, and soil types, does that mean you need to start from scratch to rank anything about tomatoes?
As a rule of thumb, if you can only come up with one or two article ideas around a topic, it’s not enough diversification for you to consider it a topic on its own. In that case, you can broaden the scope under which that topic might fall and write more about that overall cluster (i.e., zoom out of the topic a bit).
It’s not an exact science. You could probably come up with hundreds of topics around tomatoes specifically, covering things like:
Tomato growing kit
How long does a tomato take to grow?
Growing tomatoes indoors
Tomato plants stopped growing
Tomato seedlings stopped growing
How to grow tomatoes
Best soil for growing tomatoes
With each new page you publish about tomatoes, you’d add internal links to all the other tomato-related pages. This creates a strong semantic network on your website, enhancing its relevance and authority on the topic of tomatoes.
As you grow this cluster, it would become increasingly easier to rank future content about tomatoes.
Then, you could connect overlapping topics and build out other clusters as a method of expanding your topical authority to new, related areas.
An article about the [best soil for growing tomatoes] could be linked to ones about the [best soil for growing zucchini] and [best soil for growing lettuce], and then suddenly you have a ‘best soil’ content cluster.
That said, you probably couldn’t create a whole topic cluster about [rare herbs] in backyard gardens because it would be too niche and would probably fall under the topic of [herb gardening] instead.
By strategically building out topic clusters and interlinking related content, you create a robust network that signals to search engines your comprehensive coverage and expertise on a subject.
This approach not only enhances your website's topical authority but also improves its chances of ranking well for various related keywords.
More topical authority, more traffic, more revenue
At the end of the day, whether topical authority is an actual ranking factor or not, it will help your website.
If you work with experts to publish super helpful content on a topic, audiences will respect your voice around that topic more. If you publish a lot about it, you’re more likely to be found in Google Search for that topic. If you publish a lot about a topic, you’ll grow more traffic around the topic you want to be known for.
And, if you publish a lot about a topic and support all those pages with internal links, you’ll be able to rank higher for all the keywords in that topic. The rising tide lifts all boats.
Maeva Cifuentes - CEO & Founder, Flying Cat Maeva is the founder and CEO of Flying Cat Marketing, an SEO and content agency driving growth with a holistic, revenue-based SEO approach for B2B SaaS companies in HR tech, martech, and salestech. Maeva is also a fractional CMO, marketing advisor, and certified confidence coach. Linkedin
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