What is Content Depth?

Most companies like to project they are thought leaders. But it’s not enough to simply say you are an expert – you need to show it. 

As a content marketer you often have to fight internal battles like, “oh our audience already knows that.” Or, “that’s been written about a zillion times.” And while both sentiments may be true, from a search engine perspective, omitting content that you deem redundant, or not relevant to your target audience, means you can’t answer the question: “What is this [topic] about?” 

Search engines today lean into generative AI (GenAI) to respond to the immense amounts of queries being processed every second. AI is used to interpret search queries – match those queries to high quality results, and repeatedly evaluate content quality, all with the goal of constantly improving search results for the reader. 

GenAI is used by Google and other search engines to create responses rather than links. While no one outside of Google knows for sure how the algorithms work, Google offers some guidance. It is clear that both the user experience on your site, and the depth and quality of your articles are important factors in how your site ranks in search results – and whether or not your content is used in the People Also Ask sections.

Being the authoritative reference for any of the myriad of questions people ask on a given topic is what will distinguish your company as a true thought leader. Achieving topical authority requires understanding topic breadth and depth, as well as producing quality, readable content for both your reader, and the search engines. Having good quality SEO tools to assist you in reaching topical authority can give you the edge you need over your competition.

What Is Topical Depth

To appreciate the importance of Topical Depth (which used to be called “content depth”), you need to understand the nuances, how to effectively measure it, and be able to communicate its importance for budget purposes. 

First, topical depth refers to the comprehensive coverage of a broad range of subjects around a given focus topic, ensuring content is thorough and detailed. It is much more than counting the occurrences of a keyword or given phrase. It is those keywords and their relevance to other semantically-linked topics and subtopics. Further, depth refers to how well it answers reader intent. 

As Google continues to update its algorithms, it rewards content that provides a better user experience. And for a search engine, that means how well it answers the query intent of a user. If I ask the question “how does topic depth impact SEO” search engines consider it from a variety of perspectives. The intention of a CMO is to validate the need to invest in more content creation. The intention of a content marketer is to find out how to do so more efficiently and effectively. 

Google acknowledges that it wants to provide the most authoritative answer to the person searching. To prove authority, the queries of both personas need to be satisfied. So mastering topical depth is a game-changer in the search engine optimization (SEO) rankings landscape. This puts the emphasis on Semantic SEO. 

The Impact of Topical Depth on SEO 

Semantic SEO involves optimizing content to be more meaningful and contextually relevant to search engines, focusing on the intent behind user queries rather than just keywords. Content depth has been a major ranking factor since at least 2010 when Google’s MayDay update started penalizing articles for being too thin. However, it’s starting to play a more significant role in ranking effectiveness.

Article length alone is not enough for ‘depth’ to occur. Successful depth requires including a host of subtopics that are topically relevant. These must be selected in terms of relevance and user interest, lending far higher relevance efficiency.

Leaving Keywords Behind

Digital marketing teams focus on in-demand keywords, and marketing management often looks to have articles created around several in-demand keywords. However, this approach is not enough for the content creation side of the house. Focusing only on in-demand keywords doesn’t take into account the broadness of topical scope rewarded by Google’s algorithm. Nor does it allow you to create content that is adjacent and more narrowly focused for people in the consideration stage of a journey.

This approach to using several keywords is often far too narrow to serve a more specific user content match. 

‘Thin’ content leads to poor domain authority. It disconnects content from the user experience, and thus from the richly clustered website content architecture that many users (and Google’s algorithm) tend to reward.

Thin content also leads to lower click-through rates. This is particularly true when keyword prioritization overshadows article quality and user intent.

When was the last time you read an article and were satisfied because it repeated the same keyword over and over again? Most likely, never. To a reader, the inclusion of keywords is seldom useful, aside from being an indicator of initial interest.

The Value of Deep Content

In-depth content is designed to meet a reader’s needs with expert knowledge on a variety of related subjects around a focus topic. This is precisely why Google has made updates to its algorithm to reward genuine efforts at providing a depth of knowledge.  It also started to punish optimization made more or less disingenuously (i.e. with disregard for the readers’ interests).

Note that there is nothing wrong with optimizing content from a technical standpoint. We’re talking about factors like site structure, speed, and crawling visibility. These are legitimate and useful ‘edges.’ However, there’s no point in spending resources to optimize content that lacks enough meat and bones to hold a reader’s interest. That said, it is important to minimize harmful optimization footprints because this can cause penalties.

Most content planners working today understand that a healthy cadence of quality content is the secret in bringing organic traffic to a website, and thus one of the primary sources of revenue growth from a sales and marketing perspective. This requires meeting many content imperatives and keeping your content knowledge up to date.

However, planners face a challenge in getting a quick, reliable depth of knowledge upon which to base their content formulation, i.e., something a writer can execute on without first needing to do tons of inefficient manual research (which often requires unavailable in-house SEO knowledge as well as deep subject matter expertise).

How you build your Content depth strategy looks slightly different depending on the domain of your writing.

Content Depth Examples: Case Studies

Let’s explore some prime examples of content depth spanning various domains such as news articles and academic writing. It’s essential to view these case studies in the light of our previous encounter with content depth evaluation techniques and tools like MarketMuse, SurferSEO, and SEMrush’s SEO Content Template.

Content Depth in News Articles

News articles tend to show a high degree of content depth, catering to readers who have diverse backgrounds yet share a common interest in staying informed about the world. To illustrate, consider the New York Times coverage of global issues. Stories on this platform dig deep into the core of the event, combining factual reporting with contextual narratives. There is a topical relevance across the offering.

Elements such as backstory, statistical analyses and expert opinions converge to create a comprehensively in-depth piece of content. For instance, a Times’ piece on climate change might include statistics about global warming, views from environmental experts, government policies, and links to related articles. 

Consequently, these articles rank well on search engines, reflecting a strong correlation between content depth and SEO performance. 

These same techniques can be applied to B2B or B2C content creation. Your line-up of related content should center around pillar content. A pillar page is a broad topic that is usually related to a particular topic for which you want to be recognized as an expert. A topic cluster is the sum relevant content pieces around that main topic. 

To show topical authority,  create a content cluster that relates to the pillar page. Your cluster should have 5-6 pieces of  high quality content that is germane to the main topic. Use internal links to show the relationship between all your articles in your cluster. 

Topical Depth in Academic Writing

In the realm of academic writing, content depth carries unparalleled significance. Scholarly articles and research papers focus on providing a thorough investigation of a specific subject matter. Take, for instance, an academic article in a science journal about the gene editing technology, CRISPR.

The article doesn’t merely define CRISPR or talk about its potential applications. Instead, it expands on the history of gene-editing, the scientific principles behind CRISPR, its advantages over previous techniques, ethical considerations, and potential future advancements in the field. This level of detail contributes to a robust content depth, enabling the article to cater to an audience spectrum from students to fellow researchers.

Moreover, academic articles frequently employ footnotes and bibliographies that link to primary sources. Such practices impact SEO positively by aiding link analysis, a key performance metric in search visibility. 

These two case studies underscore how content depth principles are applied across different mediums and how they tangibly influence user engagement and SEO results.

Authoritative Content Knowledge With MarketMuse

Let’s take a look at MarketMuse, a SaaS content optimization tool, which, among many other features, surfaces a variety of analytics around a given topic to assist with content planning and content creation. When I ran content marketing at Coveo, I relied on MarketMuse precisely because it created a topical map on any subject. The following is a great instance of how we changed our strategy to be focused on Semantic SEO.

We started our content creation process by first doing keyword research (that part hasn’t gone away). Our company’s focus was on AI-Powered Search – but in ecommerce – it would be termed “product Discovery.” In Knowledge Management (KM), it was “information retrieval.” Knowledge management has a very low keyword demand – but it is used by KM practitioners – our buyers. A technical buyer might be looking for “Headless Search” or “predictive search.” Again these keywords would not have a lot of traffic associated with them. But the traffic they did have would be a perfect Venn diagram for our customers. Once we finalized our keyword research MarketMuse helped us to create topical maps around these related keywords.

Coveo had strong topical authority on enterprise search – but it became amplified when we started creating topic clusters around these relevant keywords. 

MarketMuse analyzes thousands of documents about any given subject. It then provides a list of topics that are adequately covered by the Top 20 SERP competitors. It also offers topics that were inadequately covered. These content gaps became a part of our content strategy. 

Writers are using MarketMuse as a reference point to increase topical relevance around a subject, as it provides real-time feedback on the depth of their content as they make changes to an article’s draft. 

In the platform, you’ll notice they use the terms “Mentions” and Suggested Mentions, along with a range of numbers. The Mentions column refers to your content – how many times a given keyword is currently being used by you. Suggested Mentions refers to the number of instances those same related topics have occurred in competitive sites. 

MarketMuse buckets these instances within the following ranges: 0, 1-2, 3-10, and 10+. For instance, a topic with 10+ suggested mentions tells you that experts often use this keyword or phrase when writing about your core topic.

You don’t necessarily have to match it to Suggested Mentions one for one. It’s really an artform – because you want to use these semantically-associated terms naturally – and not look like you are shoehorning them in. 

In the image below – we did well with using the term topical depth – but were quite sparse on topically relevant associations. We improved our topic density by nearly eliminating the number of 0 instances (the red) and increasing the number of mentions turning more yellows to green.

Another great aspect of MarketMuse is that as you are building topical authority, your “degree of difficulty” to rank for a relevant keyword becomes easier. Your high topical authority “juice” will help lift other topic-adjacent content pieces.

The Ratio of Article Length vs. Topic Depth

Although longer articles may give you the opportunity for higher content scores, if they have a low content depth efficiency, they can rank worse than shorter pieces. 

For instance, below are two articles with the same word count, but with very different rankings success. This search was done using the topic “Content Planning Tips,” something we figured you’d take an interest in.

Article 1:

• “4 Smart Content Planning Tips to Ensure a Huge ROI”
• Word Count: 1,165
• Content Score: 17
• Ranking: 20

Article 2:

• “17 Tips for Creating a Content Marketing Plan”
• Word Count: 1,165
• Content Score: 36
• Ranking: 4

Despite having exactly the same word-count, these two articles have very different content scores. Their position in the search engine ranking (SERP) is also dramatically different. 

The in-depth analysis performed by MarketMuse AI software helps content planners bridge this gap.

Quantifying Topical Depth

As noted, MarketMuse is used by writers to quantify where their content is lacking based on AI modeled data drawn from tens of thousands of relevant websites around a specific topic. Writers use the feedback as an SEO tool that delivers far better rankings results. It also helps writers work much faster because it eliminates most of the time that would otherwise be needed to do manual research.

A topical depth approach works for newly-generated content as well as existing content that needs to be refreshed and optimized. This allows you to dramatically increase the outcomes of efforts around creating authority around one or more desired subject areas.

Take for example the post you’re reading right now.

When this post was originally published in May 2018, its Content Score was significantly better than the competition with a word count that was more than adequate. During the intervening time, the competition has heated up, placing greater emphasis on creating comprehensive content that addresses this topic. As a result, the present-day target Content Score and word count are both much higher.