Creating a Topical Authority Map (Easy Guide for 2024)

A topical authority map is a list of pages and keywords that are semantically relevant to help keep an organized direction of the work that’s going to be accomplished by teams. A topical map is truly what makes the topical authority concept come to reality. For example, if you don’t go “deeper” [into the subject that you’re looking to rank for] than your competitors, it’s likely that you won’t succeed.

Key Takeaways

• A topical authority map is a tracker of semantically related keywords that all feed up to a highly competitive parent topic or competitive keyword.
• The topical authority map can be created using tools like Google, Ahrefs, SEMRush, SurferSEO, and other similar SEO tools. However, it’s not required to pay for a tool to create a topical authority map.
• A topical authority map can get created using Google (for free), however, the best tool to create a robust topical authority map is Ahrefs.

Creating a Topical Authority Map Using Google

If you don’t want to pay for any tool, you can use Google to help you create a topical authority map. However, it’s important to know that Google won’t tell you “everything.” Meaning, you may need to come up with additional topics that you yourself know are highly relevant to the parent topic.

Related: What is Topical Authority?

Step 1: Identify your target and parent keyword

You’re first going to need your target parent topic or keyword. In our scenario, we’re going to use SEO as the keyword. From here, we know that we aren’t going to create the “SEO” page, yet. Place that into Google and press search.

Step 2: Use the autocomplete

Google’s autocomplete will tell you a lot of relevant topics. However, it’s not going to show you everything. Here’s my favorite trick, after your parent keyword, add every letter of the alphabet into the search and then let the autocomplete show you what’s there.

Go through every A-Z opportunity. And every time there’s a clearly semantically related topic.

Step 3: Mark down those topics and search them

It’s important that when you start to build out those additional topics into a spreadsheet that you actually search the keywords themselves. This will help to determine the page intent of that page that you might need to create (remember: topical authority is about page creation and providing unique insights and information gain for each).

Step 4: Round out your topics with Google’s suggested topics

On the search results page, many of the semantically related terms will be sprinkled throughout the page. Remember, just because a question or a topic appears on this search results page doesn’t mean that you should produce it.

You’ll need to use some discernment to ensure that the topic is worthy of discussing or worthy of producing.

Use the following areas to do some research:

1. Look at the “people also ask” panel: These give you some idea of related topics. It’s important to think about whether these topics are worthy of their own page or not.
2. Look at the related terms at the bottom of the page: On Web, Google will show related searches which can be useful at thinking about even more semantically related topics.

Here's some examples:

Step 5: Organize your spreadsheet

It’s important to organize the spreadsheet you’re creating into a list of priorities. It’s fairly easy to see which topics are important and which ones are least important. However, I highly recommend starting your page creation process with the “easier” topics, first.

Creating a Topical Authority Map with Ahrefs

The best way to create a comprehensive topical authority map is to use Ahrefs, which is one of my favorite keyword research tools. Ahrefs actually makes creating a topical authority map quite easy.

Most people begin their journey by looking at competitors and then trying to create a map. However, I always recommend starting with your own goals and strategy in mind. You’ll be surprised how well that works.

Here’s how to create a topical authority map with Ahrefs and Google spreadsheets:

Step 1: Start with your target or parent keyword

Enter in your target or parent keyword into the keyword explorer within Ahrefs. If you don’t have the parent topic put in correctly, Ahrefs will tell you in the keyword explorer what the “parent topic” actually is.

From there, click on “View all X” it’ll say the total number of keywords under the “Terms Match” portion of the keyword explorer.

Step 2: Start to scour for related semantic words

My favorite way to find additional topics is to use the left hand sidebar that shows the number of semantically related words. It’s important that you have at least some knowledge of the topic or subject matter that you’re investing in.

The reason for that is that many words in the left hand sidebar here are not going to be entirely related or something that you should produce. Let me say that again, you can’t simply take every word in the left hand sidebar and produce a page.

You’ll want to be looking for words that clearly represent some type of question that the User might have.

Let’s use the example “SaaS Marketing” in Ahrefs.

Here are some examples of words I would pick from our example:

1. Examples
2. Metrics
3. Playbook
4. Meaning

These are pretty clearly open questions. However, as you can see, I didn’t pick everything in the list. 

Just based on those words alone, I know that I would be looking to create:

1. SaaS Marketing Examples
2. SaaS Marketing Metrics
3. SaaS Marketing Playbook
4. SaaS Marketing Meaning

Obviously I would be going much deeper than this to create the true authority. However, you can get an idea of what I mean.

I would highly recommend that you do not export all of the keywords in this list and assume that they are all semantically related.

Related: What is Topical Relevance?

Step 3: Organize your spreadsheet

As always, start organizing your spreadsheet of topically related subjects by both keyword, monthly search volume, and difficulty. It will at least give you some idea of what to produce and when to produce it.

Remember, always start with the easiest to win terms first and then work your way to the most difficult, using a robust internal linking strategy.