Topic
What Is a Topic?
A topic is the subject covered within a text, discourse, or conversation. It can be a single word, or a complete sentence.
As a content writer, you may have several topics or subtopics in any blog post or article. But as we know, subjects within a text or conversation can meander and vary. Thus, it’s important that you choose topics around specific search intents.
Too often, we choose topics based on the product or service we want to educate the public on — to sell to them.
The research process starts with knowing the broad topic, and finding the related words to that topic. The related topics, words, and subtopics will give plenty of subject matter to structure the content around.
What Topics Are Not
Topics aren’t the same thing as keywords. In the old SEO days, keywords were repetitiously scattered throughout blog posts in hopes that they would rank higher in the SERP results for those specific keywords. This method doesn’t work for a modern content writer. Search engines aren’t looking for keywords anymore.
While at surface-level, topics look similar, they’re used differently: as an overarching theme around which to build your content, using not just the main topic words, but also subtopics and semantically related words and subjects.
To understand the distinction, we show using the term “SEO for Startups” as a main topic vs a keyword. As a topic, we now have a list of relevant topics that are relatable, searchable, and relevant to your customer persona. Using “SEO for Startups” as a keyword only gives you different ways to arrange the same words.
This comparison list shows a remarkable difference between the list of topics and that of keywords for the subject “SEO for startups”.
What Topics Are
It’s important to consider our topic as more than just the keyword we want to rank high for. In today’s SEO world, keywords alone won’t get you very far. Instead, a savvy content writer needs to demonstrate both depth and breadth of understanding on their chosen topic, and any terms and topics with semantic relevance.
A platform like MarketMuse allows you to explore the related topics to your main subject matter and create in-depth articles around your topic, showing search engines your expertise in the topic, and allowing you to rank higher in SERP results.
A second important part of topics is User Intent. Writing with topics instead of keywords allows you to structure your content around what your intended persona is searching for. Google rewards sites for clustering topics around a variety of search intentions.
What questions are they asking? Where are they in their journey as a potential client or customer? These are important considerations when building your website content for your business. Platforms such as MarketMuse allow you to find questions users are asking around your topics so you can create content that fulfills your customers needs.
Using topics allows writers to create content that’s readable and relevant to both their readers and to search engines.
Modern search engines aren’t looking for content containing repetitions of the same words. Instead, they are looking for content that demonstrates an in-depth understanding of the topic.
How to Demonstrate Expertise on a Topic
The depth of a topic in a blog post isn’t repetitious, as is the case with using keywords. Rather, you are creating a map for your content, a path for your readers to follow through your related topics using topic modeling and topic clusters.
Demonstrating expertise requires two things: depth and breadth.
- Depth is shown within each blog, within each topic, using semantically related words and subjects, as well as subtopics.
- Breadth is demonstrated by creating topic clusters around the main topic, using related articles. Each blog post is linked to the others and is written in depth as well.
Creating depth and breadth using topic modeling within your online content is an important part of digital marketing, content creation, and SEO. It will help guide the reader’s journey, from researching to purchasing, and show search engines your authority on and expertise in your topic.