seo-rankings

How Building Topical Authority Helps Boost Your Google SEO Rankings

When it comes to SEO strategy, there are a lot of aspects to consider. You can’t expect Google to give you good rankings without putting in the work. And the reality is that simply focusing on your website’s content isn’t enough. To get the best results possible, you need to think about much more than just putting out content – you also have to think about how topical authority can help you achieve better rankings. This article will discuss how building your topical authority helps boost your Google search rankings 

What is Topical Authority? 

Topical authority is a measure of how well your website is performing on a particular topic. It’s also a way to examine your performance compared to your competitors and the quality of your content. While domain authority and page authority are equally as important, topical authority helps boost your overall ranking by showing you know what you’re talking about in your industry. The more high-quality, informative content you produce, the more people will trust your brand as an authoritative voice and resource on the specific subject matter. 

How Does Topical Authority Differ from Domain Authority? 

Domain Authority measures how well a website is trusted by Google. This measurement is on a scale of 0-100, with 100 representing the most trustworthy websites. 

Google uses this score to determine how well your website will perform in search results and whether they can trust it as an authoritative source of information. 

Topical authority differs from domain authority as it measures how much trust you have earned over time in a specific topic. Topical authority is determined by two main factors: 

  • The number of times your content has been linked to or shared across the web (link equity)
  • The relevance of those links that link back to you (content quality)

How Topical Authority Can Boost Your Domain Authority  

To help explain the benefits of building topical authority, let’s look at how you can use this tactic to help boost your domain authority. 

The first step is finding a topic that has enough demand. This means that people are looking for information on this topic and are willing to pay for it. 

Once you’ve found a topic with high demand, go through competitors’ websites using SEO tactics and learn what they do well. If they rank high in Google search results, determine why. Take note of what these sites are doing because you’ll want to emulate them to rank highly and outrank them in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). 

Once you’ve learned the SEO basics and understand what it takes to rank highly in search engines, you can begin building topical authority. This means you’ll want to create valuable content for your audience. If they find your content interesting and useful, they’ll likely share it with their friends and family, leading to more traffic for your website. The more people who visit, the higher your domain authority will be! 

Benefits of Building Topical Authority 

Building topical authority is essential for many reasons, and here are some of the biggest: 

  • Increased traffic: the more you know about your topic, and the more frequently you publish articles on it, the better off you’ll be in terms of overall traffic. Staying up to date with trends in news coverage will help ensure that any reader coming to your site is likely to discover something new or exciting for them (and then share it with their friends).
  • Improved rankings: as mentioned above, Google wants its users to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. If someone searches “how do I build topical authority,” their goal will be served best if they get results from sites with great information rather than sites that don’t offer much value beyond self-promotion or spammy links.
  • More links back into your site(s): link building is still one of the most effective ways to increase organic search rankings across all industries. Building trust among key influencers within an industry can hugely impact how well your content performs over time without requiring any additional effort on your part once it’s published!

How to Build Topical Authority 

  1. Niche Down 

To build topical authority, you’ll first need to understand your niche. What are the specific issues that your audience is facing? What problems do they have that you can help solve? How will you offer them something unique or different from what is currently available in the marketplace? 

  1. Keyword Research 

Keyword research is essential for building topical authority. Keywords are what users type into search engines to find the content you have written. Understanding which keywords to target and how to implement them within your content is vital for optimization and ranking purposes.  

  1. Develop a Content Strategy

After you’ve determined what your audience wants to know and which keywords they’ll likely use, you need to develop a compelling content strategy aligned with your brand. A content strategy will help you determine what types of content to create, which media will be most effective, how to promote your content, and how to track its performance. 

  1. Create Pillar Pages

Pillar content represents the primary topic content writers and SEO experts are trying to rank for by producing more specific pieces of cluster content. A pillar page is a foundation on which topic clusters are built, covering all aspects of the topic on a single page. Pillar pages broadly cover a core topic and are longer than typical blog posts because they address all aspects of the specific topic. However, they aren’t as detailed, leaving room for more in-depth information to be explored in the related cluster content. 

  1. Build Topic Clusters 

Cluster content expands on the topic covered in the pillar page, addressing specific keywords related to the in-depth topic. Apart from helping your site gain topical authority and boost rankings, pillar pages and content are efficient ways to organize multiple pieces intuitively.  

For example, you might write a pillar page about Google SEO tactics (broad topic) and pieces of cluster content about building topical authority, blogging, or effective keyword strategies. 

  1. Use Internal Links Wisely 

The best way to make your content easier to navigate is through internal links. These are the links you see on a page leading you back or forward and around your site. 

  • Linking back and forth within a post or article will help readers find related information they may be interested in while reading—and it shows them you’re here to help.
  • Linking across different articles on your site gives visitors an easy way to browse all the content you have available (which can keep them from leaving). Be sure not to overdo it—you don’t want to overwhelm your readers!

Agency Partner Interactive 

Building topical authority is one of the most effective ways to improve your Google SEO rankings. You can increase traffic, gain new customers, drive engagement, and generate conversions by establishing your business as an expert in your field. SEO is an ever-evolving process that can be overwhelming without the right partner. That’s where we come in. Agency Partner’s award-winning SEO experts can drive consistent organic traffic to your site and optimize your content to get you to the top of the SERPs and keep you there. The synergy between our SEO and Content Marketing teams enables us to help brands of all sizes and industries gain authority and dominate the market. Ready to take the leap into exponential growth? Get in touch with a digital marketing specialist at Agency Partner today! 

semantic_search

What is Semantic Search and Why is it Important for SEO?

Expert Tips For What is Semantic Search and Why is it Important for SEO?

The evolution of search engine technology goes beyond backlinks and includes as many keywords as possible. The focus is now shifting toward understanding the intent, behavior, and context behind those keywords. When we understand what the keywords mean, provide rich information that contextualizes those keywords, and discern the user’s intent, we can better understand consumer behavior. The key to working effectively and efficiently in the knowledge economy lies in semantic search. In this blog post, we’ll dive into what semantic search is and why it’s important for the new age of SEO. 

Semantic Understanding 

Semantics is a branch of logic and linguistics referring to the study of reference, meaning, or truth. Applying this discipline to SEO translates to a better understanding of consumer intent and behavior and provides rich information that contextualizes the meaning of keywords. Semantic search looks to understand the natural language the way a human would but is facilitated by machine learning and AI technologies.  

In order to rank high on Google, your website needs to use semantic search engine optimization techniques. Semantic search is the understanding of intent, behavior, and context behind search engine optimization (SEO) keywords. In order to generate the most accurate SERP (Search Engine Results Page), Google must understand the relationship between words and the context in which they are being used. 

Why is it Important? 

The implementation of Google algorithms has directly impacted SEO and facilitated a shift to adopting new best practices and techniques. Before semantic search engines were fully realized, content created for SEO purposes had to be designed around specific keyword-to-word-count ratios. Today, the emphasis is on the relevance of content and how accurately it reflects the way people naturally use language.  

The rise of voice search plays a significant role in the evolution of semantic search. Mobile voice commands are now commonplace and optimizing for this type of search is immensely different from traditional SEO as the results must immediately get to the point and keep the content much more conversational. A firm understanding of language, context, and behavior is vital to achieving this. 

People often say things and search for things in different ways, languages, and tones. Search queries can also be vague in nature. Google semantic search can distinguish between distinct entities and interpret the searcher’s intent based on factors like the user’s search history, location, global search history, and spelling variations. All of these aspects help Google provide a better user experience by delivering quality information and surfacing the most relevant content results. 

Keyword Search vs Semantic Search 

Keyword search satisfies the basic needs of a search query, but it has its limitations. They are extremely literal in the sense that the search engine finds terms wherever they appear, even if the words are used in a larger phrase or different context.  

Today, the way people search for things is often ambiguous. Semantic search takes into consideration the user’s intent to uncover the contextual meaning behind those terms and pushes beyond the boundaries of Google’s collective base of knowledge to surface the information and concepts that haven’t been explicitly written into the query. Semantic technology decrypts concepts and meaning by associating search inputs with clarifying terms, like related synonyms that have been integrated into the system. Semantic enrichment helps users find new ideas and concepts by tagging unstructured text with information about its meaning. To differentiate concepts, semantic technology references vocabularies containing all known terms for the same thing or its synonyms connects these entities to each other in hierarchical relationships, and employs algorithms to analyze the content within which those terms appear. Latent coding automatically enriches the search query and provides better, more relevant information rather than simply including the specific words searched amongst a multitude of contexts. 

Conclusion 

Even with Google’s advanced algorithm, it still isn’t smart enough to gather meaning or understanding by itself. You must optimize your site to help Google understand your content and present it to your target audience. Semantic keywords, link building, structured data, and analysis are some of the most important tools needed for business growth in the era of digitalization. 

Agency Partner Interactive is the top SEO agency to optimize your website and help your business rank #1 on Google. Our digital marketing experts have the skills to effectively utilize tools like Google semantic search and semantic keywords to accelerate the growth of your business. Contact us today to get started!