As a website owner, you might have heard the words “Content relevancy” and “Authority” thrown around a lot during your content marketing sessions with your content writer. Because the content on your website plays an extremely crucial part in letting your audience dive deeper into your business and what you have to offer them, it becomes a guiding factor for your target audience. If your website is filled with unrelated topics, not only does your search rankings take a beating, but it can also cloud the budget of your niche audience, hampering your conversion.
In our pursuit to help you navigate the dynamic terrain of content development and strengthen your topical relevance, our comprehensive article shows you the path to harness the power of topical relevance and outrank competitors.
Topical relevance, also referred to as topical authority or relevance, is a barometer to gauge how close or relevant a piece of content, information, blog, or discussion is in sync with the specific topic or keyword. It’s a crucial factor in information retrieval, content creation, and communication in general.
It is a critical SEO practice because it determines the ranking of a website or page in search engine results pages (SERPs) and for content marketing. Maintaining the topical relevance for the contents on your site helps your website audience find information that is closely related or a subset of what they’re reading about, giving them an immersive experience and ensuring they stay on track with the intended topic. It also shows that you understand your target audience and know what they’re searching for online.
From an SEO perspective, maintaining topical authority plays a crucial role in your search engine ranking because it helps the search engine determine the relevance and credibility of your website for a particular topic. It analyzes your website’s topical expertise and authority and decides if your content is of value to a specific topic.
As mentioned above, topical relevance is a crucial practice to rank your website in the search engine and give your target audience the information they’re looking for. Let’s look at several other reasons how topical relevance can add to your business:
Your content is for your audience to read, so your content can only be one that interests or appeals to your target audience. Also, your audience’s interests and preferences change over time. Content relevancy helps you form a content strategy that meets the changing needs of your audience, which makes your content of value to your readers.
Demonstrating topical relevance on your website establishes you as an authoritative and credible source within your niche or industry. When your content consistently addresses current and relevant topics, you gain the trust of your audience, and they view you as a source of information, which can lead to increased loyalty and a strong online reputation.
Since your competitors, too, are on the internet marketing their products/services through their content, staying on top of topical trends is essential for staying competitive. You must address current topics of your business niche to avoid your content becoming outdated and less relevant compared to competitors posting content according to the trends.
Topically relevant content often has a longer shelf life. While evergreen content is valuable, creating content related to current events or trends can generate ongoing interest and pull traffic to your site over time as people search for information on those topics.
Now that we’ve gone through what topical relevance is and why it’s an essential metric for SEO let’s proceed to ways to improve your topical relevance.
A proper strategy and planning for the content you want to add to your website gives you the direction of where to take your website and build topical authority accordingly. The strategy includes the content topics to heighten your authority and keywords your target audience is interested in.
Likewise, analyzing your competitors’ content will also make you aware of the topics and trends in your industry, which you can add to your list of content topics. It also covers your planning on the platforms where you can share your content to amplify its visibility and reshare value. Planning your content strategy will provide you with the initial burst of topics, which will be the base for your future topics.
When selecting the topics you want to add to your website, narrow down the content pieces, which will be the pillar for your site, subtopics, and other supporting content that connects and adds to the main topic.
Once that’s sorted, it will help create the content for your website that covers the broader topic and gives in-depth information. It also helps boost your ranking because it’ll indicate to the search engine that you have quality content on the subject the users are looking for and that your content is more valuable than your competitors. When planning your topic cluster, first identify your site’s main topic or focus, followed by a pillar page, and inter-links the pages.
The third topical relevance strategy is to focus on your target audience and structure your content around what your audience wants. Since user intent is an essential metric for search engines, it displays the results that are relevant to what the user is looking for. It distinguishes between standard and minor interpretations of a user’s query and displays suggestions accordingly.
Another effective strategy for establishing topical authority revolves around optimizing the metadata of your website, which is a critical factor in improving its search engine ranking. Your website’s structure is essential to integrate SEO elements, including the strategic use of keywords that accurately speak about what the content is about.
Conducting thorough research to identify the most appropriate keywords for various topic clusters and individual content pieces is paramount. Adding the selected keywords into the titles and meta descriptions of each content piece featured on the brand’s website is a fundamental practice content marketers vouch for.
Furthermore, you can spike your authority by including appropriate internal links connecting various website pages. This not only enhances the user’s experience but also contributes to the overall credibility of the brand.
Lastly, you should consider creating a user-friendly sitemap to optimize the site structure comprehensively. This ensures that the arrangement of landing pages and content aligns logically with the customer’s journey, enhancing navigation and overall user satisfaction.
Mastering topical relevance is critical to outranking competitors on the search ranking. As we’ve mentioned, a content strategy that ticks the box of topical authority helps build your site authority and provide visitors with valuable information that engages them. Power up your website with content relevant to your niche, and enjoy the perks of increasing website traffic. Reach out to us, and our content marketing experts will plan the content for your website to outrank your competitors and build your credibility today!