Why Topical Authority Is the New SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tricky game, that’s full of fads and gimmicks. New techniques emerge, get popular, and then get cut down by the search engines. Only a few white hat SEO techniques have consistently proven to increase your search engine rankings. Let’s revisit some of the main methods one-by-one:

Focus keywords

The original SEO strategy. Write content that focuses on a small number of keywords to improve your organic ranking for those specific keywords. As a nice bonus, when you focus on the subject of your writing, it also makes the writing tighter and more readable.

Long-tail keywords

A tried-and-true tactic. Predominantly a paid search (SEM) tactic, it’s often easier to rank for longer keywords (i.e., keywords with more words in them), as those are more specific and are more targeted to a particular audience need. In the SEM world, these tend to be cheaper, too.

Quality long-form content

The more interesting content that you write, the more value that your readers will get out of it, and the more comments/reactions you’ll get. In addition to helping you rank for those keywords, you’ll get good ‘ole fashioned audience interaction. And isn’t that the best type of marketing? Also when you write longer content, it’ll give you more points with search engines.

Relevant keywords

Definitely the up-and-comer in the SEO world, but a formidable tactic to execute. For example, when a search engine’s spider (like Google’s GoogleBot) crawls your page, it analyzes the topics covered in your blog posts and on your web pages. The more comprehensive coverage your site provides for specific issues (i.e., the higher your topical relevance), the higher Topical Authority you’ll get from Google and the higher you’ll rank in organic search.

Relevant keywords really began taking the limelight with Google’s Hummbingbird (2013) and Panda 4.0 (2014) updates, which were in large part designed to weed out websites with low Topical Authority.

Here at MarketMuse, we’ve built a set of tools specifically focused on helping you improve your keyword relevance, increasing your Topical Authority scores. You can use these relevant keywords in many ways, including in your anchor text, for link building, Give it a try and let us know your success stories!