How to build topical authority like a master SEO

When I first started diving into SEO, the concept of topical authority wasn’t as well defined as it is today.

Now it’s a key factor in healthy content strategy and search engine rankings, even if it’s not one of Google’s official ranking factors that can make or break your website’s visibility.

But building topical authority isn’t just about stuffing articles with related keywords and hitting the right search terms in your target topic—it’s about creating meaningful connections and authority across a library of content that demonstrates expertise.

In this article, I’ll walk you through a step-by-step approach to building topical authority.

It’s a process, but mastering it will set your site up for long-term success and increased website authority.

But first: If you’re just learning about this concept, you’ll need to check out What is topical authority before diving in to this article.

And if you’ve already been working toward building topical authority, check out How to measure topical authority for ways to illustrate growth to stakeholders with data. (And you know those stakeholders love their data.)

Okay, now that the standard educational article introduction is out of the way and you know what I’m going to cover, let’s dig in.

How to build topical authority

1. Select a wide breadth of topics

2. Use subtopics to build content depth

3. Write comprehensive content

4. Find a unique angle for every piece

5. Define your brand’s voice

6. Ensure crawl efficiency

7. Increase your publishing velocity

8. Market your brand on other domains

9. Continue monitoring existing content

1. Select a wide breadth of topics related to your key offerings

Topic breadth (also known as horizontal topical authority) refers to the number of semantically-related topics you cover in your content strategy.

Let’s say you sell customer relationship management (CRM) software, and you want to rank high on SERPs for commercial intent keywords like [best CRM software] or [buy CRM software.]

If you only target bottom-of-the-funnel (BOF) keywords, you’re skipping the top and middle sections of the sales funnel, which is where you build trust and brand visibility.

In addition to targeting BOF search queries, you’ll also want to target topics at the top of the funnel to build a relationship with prospective leads over time. You can do that by covering adjacent subjects with topical relevance.

For “CRM software,” related topics can include:

• Sales

• Analytics

• Marketing

• Productivity

• Email marketing

Horizontal topical authority provides context around your brand’s level of expertise, and you can use it to suggest use cases for your product.

Targeting search queries that are across your target audience’s search journey is a smart move.

2. Use subtopics within your core target topics to build content depth

Once you know the high-level semantic topics (some SEO practitioners call these content pillars) you want to cover, it’s time to think about content depth.

Content depth helps inform your keyword research.

In short, you’re brainstorming the individual content pieces (and target keywords) that will support your content pillars.

The idea here is to create a content hub for each pillar.

Now, before we dig to deep into this strategy, you need to know I’m not necessarily advocating for the “Skyscraper article and cluster articles” approach of the past.

While a pillar + cluster article approach—or a “hub and spoke” approach as some call it—is still a healthy and viable method for organizing your content strategy, you need to look at this tactic through the lens of offering perspective-driven content that is rich with information gain.

I don’t support a push-button, generic content production approach to this model, and neither does Clearscope... because it isn’t a smart competitive move and often goes against Google’s EEAT guidelines.

Okay, with that note out of the way, let’s take one of the pillars from our CRM scenario: marketing.

For this topic, you can develop content around the following core topics and target keywords:

• Digital marketing

• ROI of marketing

• Content marketing

• Marketing analytics

• Marketing strategies

• Social media marketing

• Marketing funnel stages

• How to write a marketing plan

By covering a subject in-depth with several different pieces of content that take on different perspectives (see Bernard Huang’s guidance on Ranch-style SEO), you’re proving to readers and search engine algorithms that you have comprehensive knowledge about a given topic.

As opposed to a superficial, generic understanding that’s often reflected in copycat content across the web.

There are a few free GPTs for ChatGPT users out there that can help you create build topic maps quickly to keep you organized as you take on creating content for subtopics.

I’ve tried the Topical Authority For SEO GPT Generator created by Rowan Stainsby, and I really liked its organized, table-based approach to brainstorming topic clusters. (Clearscope is not affiliated with this GPT in any way… and it’s free!)

3. Write comprehensive content

Now that we’ve covered the two elements of your editorial strategy, let’s turn to the tactics you can use to optimize each piece of content.

To start, take the same idea of depth we used for keyword selection and apply it to content creation.

To establish expertise, you should cover each subtopic in depth by answering the main question and then elaborating to provide more value.

Related themes and questions are an excellent starting point when you want to figure out what else to include in your post.

Let’s take the keyword [marketing analytics].

That’s an informational term where the user goes to a search engine to learn more about marketing analytics.

If we look at this keyword in the Clearscope content editor, the Research tab will show related themes and questions.

Let’s look at a few of the related themes and see how you can turn them into sections of a post:

• Customer: Measuring customer satisfaction, lifetime value of a customer, customer-focused metrics

• Digital: Digital marketing analytics metrics, social media marketing analytics, email marketing analytics

• Software: When to use marketing analytics software, best marketing analytics software, how to choose marketing analytics software

You can also add content depth by answering questions listed in the Research tab, such as:

• How is marketing analytics done?

• What are examples of marketing analytics?

• What are the different kinds of marketing analytics?

That’s the difference between doing the bare minimum in creating generic content and creating valuable content that anticipates the reader’s needs.

4. Find a unique angle for every piece

Along with focusing on accurate and in-depth content, find a way to set each of your pieces apart from the competition.

Let’s face it — a lot of information is repeated on Google and other search engines.

So what will make you unique in readers' eyes and Google’s algorithm?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

The not-so-secret way to do this is through incorporating information gain into your particular topic.

Create unique material that is directly relevant to the user's search intent, offering new insights on existing topics or exploring them from fresh perspectives with original, first-party information.

There are a few approaches you can take, such as:

• Including expert quotes or interviews

• Providing a new method or solution

• Suggesting a new point of view on an existing topic

• Offering primary research (doing your own studies or surveys)

All of those are excellent choices, and the good news is that you don’t have to stick with just one.

Just make sure to include at least one for each piece of content you create.

5. Define your brand’s voice

At some point, you might have several people generating content for your brand, whether you outsource or hire in-house.

As your content operations expand, creating a seamless, authoritative, high-quality content and user experience for your brand is crucial by establishing content standards and defining your voice.

How jarring would it be if your blog posts didn’t have the same tone, grammar rules, or structures?

Consistency is an essential part of reliability and trustworthiness for searchers finding their way to you through Google Search or interactive AI chats, like ChatGPT or Perplexity.ai.

So, you want to decide how your brand looks, feels, and sounds to your readers and search engines before you work on scaling content.

To do that, create a brand style guide describing the voice and tone writers should use when creating content—and make sure to include it in your SEO content brief.

For instance, is your brand casual or serious? Friendly and conversational or formal and professional?

Your brand guide should also include:

• How to handle numbers

• Best ways to craft citations for trusted sources

• Guidelines around humor

• Punctuation and formatting for lists

• Particular “brand stances” on relevant topics or specific subjects that might be controversial in your niche

• Other authoritative websites, subject matter experts, or go-to resources and studies to cite via external links that are brand-aligned

• If you use first, second, or third-person pronouns

• Which grammar rules to follow (such as AP Style or Chicago Style)

• Capitalization for titles and headings (like sentence case vs. title case)

• Which version of words with various spelling to use (like ecommerce vs. e-commerce)

When you define your brand’s voice early and the ways you’ll approach specific topics, it’s easier to scale without disrupting the reader’s experience.

Not to mention, style guides also serve as accountability and quality assurance tools for writers and editors across your authoritative content.

6. Ensure crawl efficiency

Crawl efficiency refers to how easy (or difficult) it is for search engine bots to discover and index the pages on your website.

If they have difficulty getting through your web pages, then your efforts to create contextually-relevant pages can be ineffective.

Internal link building and URL structure are the two main factors to improve crawl efficiency, and a pillar and cluster approach can be helpful here.

Essentially, if you have specific topics you’re targeting, tackle the highlights on one pillar page, and dig into the specifics via related subtopics. And internally link those pages together.

Why would you do all this work?

Well, adding relevant and useful internal links with thoughtful anchor text to each piece of content helps search engines understand your website’s structure and hierarchy.

This can be time-intensive, especially if you have a large content inventory.

But Clearscope makes discovering internal linking opportunities throughout your content easy-peasy, saving you a ton of time. Learn more via a demo.

READ ON: What Is Pagerank in SEO, and Why Does It Matter?

Internal linking also makes it easier for search engines (and readers) to get to know your brand by discovering more of your content, rather than exploring broad topics throughout your site by clicking on main navigation menus.

Start by keeping your URL structure evergreen. In other words, create guidelines for URL structures ahead of time so that there’s consistency even if you hire new people.

For instance, let’s say you’re building a content pillar around the topic of “CRM,” and you have articles around keywords like “what is a CRM?” and “CRM for marketing.” Your URL structures may look like this:

• yourdomain.com/crm/what-is-a-crm

• yourdomain.com/crm/crm-for-marketing

In this example, you start with the topic and then use the exact match keyword, making it easy for readers and search engines to understand that both pages fall into the “CRM” topic cluster.

READ MORE: Want more technical SEO strategies? Check out How to Master On-Page SEO

7. Increase your publishing velocity

While quality is the most important aspect of a content marketing strategy, quantity comes in a close second.

Semrush’s 2022 State of Content Marketing survey asked respondents which tactics were most effective with organic content ranking in 2021, and 45% said, “creating more content and posting more often.”

(The only tactic that had more success was “improving the quality of our content, making it more authentic,” which 61% of respondents chose.)

Increasing publishing velocity can be a good way to prove your subject matter expertise to search engines—as long as you don’t sacrifice quality.

If you want to ramp up your content volume, there are a few steps you can take.

• You can expand your content team by hiring new in-house writers or outsourcing content creation. The Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 B2B Benchmark Report found that 86% of B2B organizations outsource content creation.

• You can cover one topic in several formats by repurposing helpful content you’ve already created. For example, you can take a webinar and turn it into shorter video segments, an infographic, and an article featuring quotes from the presenters.

• Adopt healthy, EEAT-based AI-assisted content practices—practices that are people-first, so you can write content while increasing efficiency and maintaining quality.

However, a word of caution here: Increasing your publishing velocity doesn’t automatically equal more topical authority earned.

Nope. Not at all.

In SEO industry leader Kevin Indig’s August 26, 2024, newsletter issue, Kevin made the case—with evidence—for content quality over quantity for Google indexing on the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Even an increase in relevant content targeting relevant keywords your target audience is searching for doesn’t guarantee higher website traffic or top search engine rankings in your particular subjects of expertise.

8. Market your brand on other domains

Your backlink profile plays a key role in building topical authority, but perhaps not in the way you'd expect.

It’s not about getting a ton of relevant backlinks from sites with a higher domain rating that yours; it’s about earning quality backlinks from other authoritative sources within the topic that you’d like to earn more authority in.

For example, if you’re a SaaS company that provides a CRM software platform, you’d likely want to earn backlinks from sites adjacent to your niche, like project management software, sales team software, AI customer support tools, etc.

While you can’t control when and how other people mention your brand on their domain or backlink to your content, you can market yourself and your content to get it out there.

Specifically, you can take advantage of guest posting on other sites with similar or higher domain authority or topical authority.

Many SEO marketers lean into guest posting (and participation) to reach relevant new audiences and boost their brand’s perceived authority and expertise.

Examples of guest participation that are not blog posts include:

• Providing expert quotes for other content creators

• Participating in case studies for your vendors’ website content

• Partaking in webinars about your main topics of expertise for another brand

• Engaging in educational social media exchanges on LinkedIn

All of those options help you reach more viewers, establish credibility and strong topical authority, and can generate more inbound links to your domain.

9. Continue monitoring existing content

High-quality SEO content isn’t just comprehensive and easy to read.

It also needs to be up-to-date and based on the latest findings to stay relevant.

Auditing existing content and updating your previously published articles is a productive way to continue getting the most out of your content investment.

It can also boost your topical authority because people will trust you more if you regularly update content.

Semrush’s survey found that 57% of brands audit their content twice a year or more. And they see results: after updating content, 45% of respondents saw more engagement, and 43% said their SERP rankings improved.

Here are a few steps to take when auditing and updating your existing posts:

• Update statistics and citations to reflect the most recent findings. If you cite annual surveys or benchmark reports, update those each year.

• Address new trends and technology. Keep up with changes, especially when writing about technology. Cover new platforms (such as TikTok) or feature updates (like Google’s AI Overviews).

• Look for changes in user intent for the primary keyword. Analyze search intent for primary keywords to ensure that you’re still answering the right questions.

Clearscope helps you reoptimize content to sharply meet search intent and protect that hard-earned search volume traffic.

Clearscope’s optimization tool features a content inventory that automatically monitors your published pieces and notifies you of changes in content health, Page 1 visibility, or user intent.

That way, you know when it’s time to update.

Final tips: Topical authority and how to implement it on your site

For those of us tracking our strategy’s progress in tools like Clearscope, Moz, Semrush, or Ahrefs—or simply by referencing Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines as we create content—we know how building topical authority helps achieve higher rankings... whether officially or unofficially.

If you want to capture more organic traffic, it’s helpful to establish high topical authority by positioning your website as an industry thought-leader.

By doing so, you prove to readers and search engines that your website is a trustworthy source of expert information. And that’s where practical tactics like content clusters and semantic SEO come into play to make sure people see you in the SERPs.

It’s all about sharply addressing user intent in your target search queries and main topics, using everything from long-tail keywords to well-structured FAQs that provide value.

With Google’s Hummingbird update and an increasing focus on related search and seed keywords, search engines are getting smarter, meaning we need to be just as savvy with our optimization techniques.

But you don’t have to make all these content strategy decisions in the dark.

Explore Clearscope today if you’re ready to take the guesswork out of content SEO, write stuff that people actually want to read, and protect that hard-earned organic visibility.