What is Topical Authority? Facts, Strategies, More (2024)

Topical authority is a processor or “scoring mechanism” that was put in place and invented by Google to better understand the overall quality of a website and individual pages. Topical authority is a measurable concept, however, not the exact name used by Google and its ranking system. For example, topical authority is very similar to domain authority. In that these terms were created by the SEO community to describe a measurable concept.

Key Takeaways

• Topical authority is a processor or “scoring mechanism,” invented by Google, to better understand the overall quality (experience, expertise, authority, and trust) of a website. Topical authority is a branded concept by the SEO community but not a ranking factor that has been publicly disclosed by Google.
• It’s unclear whether other search engines use topical authority or whether it is just Google. However, Google bases much of the topical authority system on its own knowledge graph. Comparing how an individual website ranks against its own understanding of a subject.
• Creating topical authority will always come down to the creation of key pages that help Google’s systems to better measure the quality of your website. This occurs in both unranked pages (like a ‘privacy policy’ and ‘about us’ page) as well as ranked pages (ones that target keywords).

What is Topical Authority? A Deep Dive

Topical authority is a measurable KPI that was invented by the SEO community to help understand a given domain's ability to rank for a specific subject-matter or topic. Usually implying that by producing “more pages” or “more content” of a certain subject, the domain will have “more authority in that subject.” However, that’s not exactly how it works.

To understand topical authority, we really have to go back and understand Google’s roots and the challenges that they faced. In particular, we have to look back about 10-years.

Google’s challenges over the years that led to topical authority

Historically, here are some the challenges Google faced over the years:

• 2009 to 2011: Google faced many challenges over “spun content” and the abuse of backlinks that led to SPAM websites appearing in SERPs (search engine results pages). As a result, they created systems like Panda and other ways of identifying abuse of the system through stolen or copywritten content and poor backlinks.
• 2011 to 2019: In this era, Google really began to work on understanding insights and information. Hummingbird became a part of identifying page-level relevancy for individuals' search terms. And, in particular, leaning into newly created BERT, which helped it to understand how to match pages with even deeper search intent. In this era, Google really became more of a Q&A machine than anything else.
• 2019 to 2020: More recently, Google started to notice abuse of the BERT system. Where keywords, keyword clusters, and use of keyword stuffing became more common. Toward 2018, this is really when the birth of “on page optimization tools” became “a thing.”
• 2020 to Now: Google started to face a challenge of websites appearing in search engines that appeared helpful to its systems, however, were not truly helpful to the end User. As a result, they needed a new way to determine truly helpful content (welcome EEAT and more).

Which leads us to where we are now. 2024 and going into 2025. Google still has this very same problem. The core question is: what makes a very helpful website? It’s fairly clear and evident from the research that I’ve done that Google did some very basic User research.

The User research looked into how visitors determine a website is trustworthy. The simplest explanation is if you have an ecommerce website. If you purchase a product from a store and there is no page telling you how to return your product, is the website helpful? Answer: no it’s not.

Or if you have a website that says it’s a professional SaaS business and there’s no privacy policy or terms and conditions that you’ve outlined (user agreements), is it truly a helpful website? Answer: no it’s not.

You might be getting the idea already…

How topical authority truly works

Regardless of what you’ve read elsewhere, topical authority is not just simply looking at pages that you publish under a single topic. That’s where everyone gets this confused. It’s about the User signals you are sending to your entire domain.

Let me explain…

Think of topical authority as a scoring mechanism. And Google’s scoring system is based on one question, “Did this help the User?” A “1” point for a page that helped the User and then negative “-1” point for a page that didn’t. When you really achieve topical authority is when you’ve scored highly for the domain across multiple pages. So your question is, how do I build that? How do I build topical authority? We’ll get into that, hold tight…

Where many people and websites get this confused is that Google needs to see both pages that are getting traffic from rank position and pages that are not. It’s a comprehensive look at your domain’s performance.

Related: SaaS SEO Guide

You’ll need some foundational pages to be published to Google:

• Privacy Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Refund Policy
• Guarantees
• User Agreements
• About Us
• Help
• And so on… pending the type of business that you have.

As well as pages that rank for given keyword targets and pages that don’t have any keywords associated with them at all.

You’ll need some easy to rank pages to start:

We’ll get into how to choose these keywords in a moment. But what you’ll need are some very easy to win topics. Let’s presume we’re a running company:

• How to find the perfect running shoes for bowlegged people
• How to find the perfect running shoes for flat footed people

These are most likely easier to win than:

• Best running shoes

And when I say “easy to win,” I’m referring to your ability to rank these keywords. As a result of ranking these keywords, Google can track the User data associated with the page. Giving you that scoring mechanism and starting the process.

See, topical authority looks at both foundational and User signals to build your overall profile. Which in turn, means that you become more trusted.

Winning highly competitive keyword terms:

Since “Trust” and “Expertise” is a heavier part of Google’s ranking systems now, from the above, you start to “earn it” over time. This means, if you truly know how to execute a topical authority roadmap or a topical authority map, you can make it easier on yourself to win big and highly competitive keywords.

Related: B2B SaaS SEO Guide

A Few Things Topical Authority Is Not

There are many misconceptions about the concept. So here are a few things it is not:

1. It is not about backlinks

Backlinks do not play any role in building topical authority. That’s because there is no real way, at scale, for Google to correlate a specific topic on websites to your website. Think about it, there’s simply not enough websites that only speak to 1 or 2 topics out there. And not enough to truly give a “profile” of your website.

Once again, think about it, you’ll start naturally earning backlinks from multiple types of websites. Which would cause the idea that topical authority is built through backlinks to essentially “water itself down.”

Many people may debate me on this. So let's pull open a very topically authoritative page from Betterteam.com, one of my top examples. Here is what the backlink profile looks like:

What we can see is that none of these domains have anything to do with jobs. We don't see Indeed on the list. Or anything else. Meaning, it's not a topically relevant backlink that's driving any type of authority, it's the creation of content and pages and creating a very robust internal linking strategy.

2. It is not about who publishes your content

Many people believe EEAT is built by who publishes your content. In my opinion, this was a reaction of the SEO community when EEAT first rolled out. And has no quantitative backing to it. In fact, there’s a stronger correlation with simply trusted websites earning more rank position than specific authors being a contributor to rank position.

The SEO community pointed at having profile photos, author names, and other biography information as being the main driver of EEAT and topical authority. However, that’s fairly implausible if you stop and think about it…

A great author on a crappy website isn’t going to rank…

3. It is not about publishing large quantities of content

Another big misconception from the SEO community is that if you simply “publish content,” you’ll build topical authority. Remember, you have to actually rank first, get traffic, and send positive User signals (or points for your domain) in order to be rewarded with topical authority.

So if you just simply publish all sorts of garbage content and do it “in mass,” then you’ll likely not get topical authority. This is a largely common misconception of the strategy.

Websites who display large quantities of information gain (Google patent here) over multiple pages, tend to both rank and earn point rewards on an individual domain basis. In fact, if I had to wager, I would think that “bringing new insights to the internet” is going to be far more heavily weighted in building topical authority than we think.

Which leads me to where I’m about to go…

How to Build Topical Authority

Topical authority is built by creating supportive pages that are interlinked between each other in a type of knowledge graph. That means that entities (or people, places, and things) have relationships between each other.

The concept is that you prove that you have an equal or greater knowledge than Google’s own systems, through these supportive and accurate pages. In short: to build topical authority you must create pages that are extremely insightful, and helpful to Users, with a robust and well thought-out internal linking strategy.

Related: On-page SEO Factors

Building national level topical authority for websites

Let’s say you wanted to ask ChatGPT how to build topical authority. You wouldn’t ask it that exact question. What you would want to do is ask a question like you would someone on the street.

Here’s my example scenario. You have two people, one is a pest control expert on the right. And on the left is a regular person you found on the street. You ask both, “What are common pests that annoy people in this area?”

Which person is going to have a longer list? The pest control expert, right? This is what you need to prove to Google to earn topical authority (remember though, this isn’t about content publishing!).

What you would ask ChatGPT is, pretend you’re a pest control expert, which pests commonly annoy people around the US? Once you have that list, now you’re working with something. Here’s what it spit out for me:

So these are very clearly the pages that you want to create. So how do you create them? Well, this is where your SEO strategy as a whole comes in. I would be producing pages about these pests and how to deal with them if I were a national company looking to rank nationally.

Then, I would be producing informational pages all about each pest. And bringing unique and new insights to the table for each article.

Related: Building a Topical Authority Map

Building topical authority for local websites

You can still build topical authority for local websites. In fact, it gets a lot easier when you look at that as a helpful way of building your authority up. For example, let’s take a look at what Ahrefs has when I put in “Pest Control Chicago:”

From the screenshots I can see terms like:

1. Apartment
2. Removal
3. Extermination
4. Residential
5. Squirrels
6. Flea

This would give me some idea of what people and search engines are looking for (remember: they’re the same now).

My local SEO plan to create topical authority would then be to create pages like:

1. Apartment Pest Control Removal Services
2. Pest Control Removal Services for Chicago
3. Pest Extermination for Chicago
4. Residential Pest Services
5. Flea Removal Services for Chicago
6. Squirrel Prevention Services in Chicago

And I would obviously create more than that. However, you can see how I would be targeting particular helpful pages and keywords and then building up my overall authority for the area.

In addition, keywords like “price” and “commercial” popped up on the list. Pending what type of services I offered in the area, I might create additional service pages for those.

The net result of creating very helpful pages for these terms? Topical authority.

Using Ahrefs to Build a Topical Authority Map

Here’s the thing, no matter what SEO experts are saying on Twitter or YouTube, you’ll need some idea of your subject-matter to truly win topical authority. That’s almost the whole point: to prevent people who don’t know what they’re talking about from ranking on important keywords.

Picture it, do you really want a non-medical professional telling you information on Google? No. You’d much rather rely on real experts.

Your goal with your topical authority map

Let’s say we were talking about a health subject. Let’s say it’s fitness. Your goal with the authority map should be to build something like the following:

1. Fitnesssome text
   1. Bench Pressingsome text
      1. Proper Technique
      2. Improper Technique
      3. Tips
      4. Pain
      5. Bench Pressing for Women
      6. Bench Pressing for Men
   2. Squattingsome text
      1. Proper Technique
      2. Improper Technique
      3. Tips
      4. Painsome text
         1. Hurting my neck
         2. Hurting my back
      5. Squatting for Women
      6. Squatting for Men

See the knowledge graph that’s getting built. We sometimes have to drill deeper into one particular subject rather than staying on the top-level of it. For example, in the “Pain” portion for squatting, it was clear from keyword research that people have pain in their neck and in their back from squatting. They want to know about both.

As a result, you’ll likely want to create pages addressing both issues. Here are some ways you can use Ahrefs to start getting some of this same data:

1. Find a competitive website with some authority already

Most times, you’ll find a website with a low domain rating or low amounts of backlinks ranking for highly competitive terms or keywords. This would indicate that a website already has the topical authority we’re looking for.

Hold your horses! The strategy is not to replicate the website. Because remember, you’ll have to beat them! What does beat mean? It means you’ll have to show Google you know more about the topic or subject-matter than that website.

But this strategy can give you a jump start. Here’s what you should do in Ahrefs:

1. Enter in a strong keyword that is under your umbrella
2. Go to “Terms Match” under the keyword explorer tab
3. Under the filters, put in “Lowest DR” and pick a domain rating that’s something between 30 and 45 depending your subject
4. Click and open various keywords that appear in the list and look for these domains

You’ll need to hunt for a domain that makes sense. This will take some time. However, once you’ve found one. Then, do two things:

1. Open their Sitemap.xml file and look at all the pages they’ve created.
2. Look through the website and look at how they are performing internal linking.
3. Look through the website and look at how they’re structuring their content.
4. Lastly, use the “Top Pages” tool in Ahrefs to get an idea of what’s ranking.

From there, if you’re understanding topical authority by now, you should be able to come up with a starting point to replicate the foundational pages and supportive pages that are giving the website authority (remember: it’s not the most competitive terms you want to start with, it’s the least competitive terms).

2. Go very narrow into a specific subject

This strategy to find topical authority to TAKE from the market. Yes, I used the word TAKE. Meaning it’s open authority that you can go claim, you’ll need to follow this strategy:

1. Start with a large keyword that you want to target
2. Open that in the Ahrefs keyword explorer
3. Click and open “Terms Match”
4. On the left hand panel, start to hunt for individual words that make sense
5. Use your discretion to think about how they are matching terms to your parent topic
6. Determine if they require a new page to get created or not

This strategy for building topical authority is still highly underutilized. And it’s because many people don’t want to do the work to produce a page that doesn’t have any search volume. However, those that do the work are always rewarded.

3. Use the content gap tool in Ahrefs

Ahrefs allows you to also see how your website compares to another when it comes to content. You can use the content gap tool in Ahrefs to compare two domains and see where you might be missing content.

However, the only drawback to this strategy is that it might send you away from a specific subject instead of diving deeper into a single one. Like we were able to see in our knowledge graph tree before starting this process.

How to Create Topical Authority Internal Linking

You don't need to overthink this in many cases. If your website is very simple, let's say you have a single-topic website, your internal linking may simply be a breadcrumb navigation or a single blog index. More complex websites, like healthcare websites (think WebMD) may have to think more about internal linking in the form of silos and highly semantically relevant terms.

Once again, this boils down to your comprehension and understanding of the subject-matter. For eaxmple, if I asked a doctor about respiratory infection, they would know certain prescriptions are related to it. As a result, your internal linking structure would need to be the same.

Here's an example of a very basic topical authority internal linking strategy:

Note the presence of all links on a single page. Since the entire website is about trivia, this makes sense. It's not extremely helpful to a User, but you might be surprised what a giant wall of links can do. As you click into these pages, there is breadcrumb navigation going back up to this parent or pillar page, resulting in the "connection" we're looking for.

In many ways, this replicates the entire keyword list that may exist inside of Ahrefs, SEMRush, or other keyword planning tools.

More complex internal linking needs

GoodRX does a fantastic job of creating a highly robust and clearly custom internal linking strategy. One that's generated programmatically. We can see related articles that are comparing medications that are similar:

And we can see a list of internal links that is showing Google the entire catalog of medications which helps it to develop the required authority to rank for very difficult medical keywords:

We can see the list of medications by their name as well as that little "View all" link which is going right here.

As you can see from this page, GoodRX is doing a fantastic job of showing that it really comprehends the full catalog of medications. Matching any knowledge graph that Google may have. Incredibly difficult to create and incredibly difficult to compete with.

Topical Authorities Scoring Mechanism

While this is just my own concept, I believe that all of this boils down to Google creating points against pages and domains (or websites). The more points you can stack up that indicate that you're a helpful website under a given topic or subject matter, the more likely you are to rank for something.

As a result, you can destroy your topical authority if you:

1. Lose rank position: Losing rank position for multiple pages means that you potentially are sending negative User signals (like bounce rate or engagement rate) back to Google, which starts to penalize other non-related pages (the helpful content update).
2. Remove pages: If you remove pages that are helping you or potentially not helping you with topical authority (which is very hard to measure in sequential order), you could ruin topical authority, too.

My suggestion: always be updating your websites pages for clarity, expertise, information, accuracy, and whether or not the page has monthly search volume associated with it, work hard to make it the best thin on the internet. It sounds simple, however, this is truly the best way to win over Google's scoring mechanics (which while we can't prove it are very evidently there).

Topical Authority FAQs

Common questions and answers about topical authority:

What is topical relevance?

Topical relevance is the idea that a given domain will have more topical authority than another, allowing you to rank a relevant page in a “more likely fashion” than another domain. However, topical relevance is very similar to topical authority.

Is domain authority the same as topical authority?

Honestly, these seem to be getting awfully similar to one another. In a way, it’s simply a way of Google scoring a given domain or website for its overall quality. So in a sense, you’re more likely to rank your website and get traffic by building topical authority than you are building domain authority.

This is why we typically don’t recommend the use of backlinks as part of the overall strategy to build topical authority. Or even to build backlinks at all!

How do we know topical authority is real?

Well, if you’ve watched the SERPs (search engine results pages) long enough, it’s fairly clear that it’s real. You’re likely to bump into websites that are fairly new and are able to rank for amazing keywords.

Here’s an example of a website right here. This website took trivia questions to the next level, creating trivia question pages for almost every search query. And making unique and helpful pages. As a result, they won trivia questions as a category/niche:

How do pillar pages work with topical authority?

From the way that I’ve executed them, pillar pages don’t really matter. However, sometimes, you’ll need to think through the page intent of and your keyword match. As an example, “Job Descriptions” is a very competitive term and keyword that would require a number of semantically related pages to be connected to it.

Think about it, all of the various jobs and individual job descriptions that people are looking for on Google. The pillar page intent type is commercial investigation (meaning it’s a page full of navigational links). You should only create a pillar page if you see that this is a requirement.

Otherwise, you don’t need to be creating pillar pages, you really just need to create category pages within a blog and ensure that your content is classified, tagged, and categorized based on your understanding of the semantic relationships between entities (nouns) and subject matters.

Here is an example from Betterteam on the job descriptions pillar page: