Another way to improve your website’s topical authority is by changing the site’s structure to rank better.
Your site structure should already incorporate SEO indicators, such as using highly ranking keywords to describe your content.
You must research keywords and keyword volume thoroughly to ensure that you’re ranking for the right keywords. Then you can work out which keywords will work best for your topic clusters and articles.
When creating new pieces of content, content marketers should include keywords in both meta descriptions and meta titles.
Another thing to incorporate into your site’s structure is relevant links to other pages and articles to help build brand authority.
A sitemap is crucial in digital marketing, and in terms of site structure, a comprehensive sitemap is really important.
A sitemap will help the landing pages and the blog pages make sense for the user’s journey.
As mentioned above, building relevant external links is crucial to improve your business’ topical authority - in addition to creating topic clusters and improving your content output.
Even if your site is filled with great content, it’s a good idea for it to have links in it so the content ranks better.
When considering link building for topical authority, you must make sure that you’re linking to relevant websites. Getting links from businesses in the same industry and niche as yours will help your websites gain relevance and link.
No matter if a link links to a highly ranking site, if there’s little relevance between your website and the site, the link will still carry less weight.
There are a few different methods for gaining topical backlinks, these include:
- Guest blogging - get your website to create useful content for related websites
- Skyscraper technique - create go-to resources for your niche
- Ego bait - write about key players in your industry and contact them
- HARO - make sure to get expert quotes for your articles
Internal linking is an absolute must when considering topical authority.
Once you’ve written all these great new pieces of content to boost your site’s topical authority, it would be a shame if there was no internal link, so users couldn’t find it.
Luckily internal linking is also helpful for search engines and the more internal links you have on your site, the better it is for SEO.
E-A-T stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness and it has become increasingly important for SEO. E-A-T may not be a direct ranking factor, but the concept does help to inform ranking algorithms.
If you want to improve your website’s topical authority, it’s important to consider building your website’s reputation as a “subject matter expert”, which will contribute to the “A” (authority) part of E-A-T.
It can be difficult to measure topical authority - particularly because there is a lack of clarity surrounding the term.
We know that topical authority can boost rankings and increase traffic. But if, as part of your comprehensive SEO strategy, you’re already fixing technical issues that have been impacting SEO or you’re already building links, how can you know the direct effect that your topical authority has on your website’s SEO?
At RobotZebra, we use a range of different tools to determine how much your work on topical authority has improved your website’s SEO.