Why Is Topical Authority Important In SEO? (Top 6 Benefits)

This search engine optimization (SEO) guide answers the question, “Why is topical authority important?”

Below, you’ll find out the importance of topical authority for a website’s search engine rankings and get a list of the top benefits of topical authority.

We’ll look at how topical authority can create a better user experience, how it can improve your site’s rankings with SEO, and how you can gain user trust by improving your topical authority score.

Why Is Topical Authority Important In SEO?

Topical authority is important in SEO because topical authority helps search engines understand the subject matter a website demonstrates expertise in, which correlates with a positive user experience. As a result, a website with topical authority has better potential to rank for topically related keywords.

Benefits of Topical Authority for SEO

1. Better User Experience

The top benefit of topical authority in SEO is that is provides a better user experience which is measured by search engine ranking algorithms.

To gain topical authority, you must create a range of content covering different angles within a certain topic. For example, if you wanted to be seen as having authority in the area of board games, covering everything from tabletop RPGs to family card games will give users a reliable website to return to with in-depth information to call upon whenever they need to find a new game.

This has obvious benefits for a site owner (more on those in a moment), but it makes a huge difference for users. If your website has good topical authority on a particular subject, users are more likely to be able to find you on Google for a variety of related search queries. As a result, users will find everything they’re looking for in one place, which improves the overall experience.

Google’s focus on quality content makes searching on the web a more pleasant experience for everyone. It makes it easier for users to get to good content immediately rather than sifting through spammy, keyword-stuffed content, on topics that the website doesn’t demonstrate authority on.

2. Improved Google Rankings

The importance of topical authority can’t be underestimated regarding Google’s search engine. Google’s algorithm uses different metrics to create a topical authority score for each site. Naturally, the higher the score, the better is for your rankings: a high score means your site is more likely to rank for specific keywords.

It’s a good idea to become familiar with the acronym E-E-A-T (formerly E-A-T):

• E – Experience (the first-hand experience of the content creator.)
• E – Expertise (the knowledge or skills of the content creator.)
• A – Authoritativeness (the content creator or website being recognized as a good source for that topic.)
• T – Trustworthiness (the content is safe, accurate, and reliable.)

Google rates the quality of a website and its individual pages based on those core concepts. This means users are less likely to encounter spam when the top-ranking websites show experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Authority is a big part of what causes a site to rank for a particular topic, so it’s worth increasing your topical authority for important subject matters that are relevant to your business to increase the chance of your site being seen by the right people. The better your topical authority, the better your site will perform on Google.

3. Increased Keyword Opportunities

Another good thing about focusing on topical authority is that it naturally increases opportunities to use keywords, including semantic keywords, which improves the likelihood of your content ranking high on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

If you’re trying to build up your website’s topical authority, you’ll want to focus on creating a lot of valuable, high-quality content by content creators who are experts in their fields.

For example, instead of creating just one long article on a particular topic that covers every aspect of the subject, a much better SEO strategy is to publish multiple articles that are focused on a single aspect of that topic. Then, interlink them all together for the user.

Creating a series of articles or blog posts on a specific subject will allow you to capture more targeted keyword opportunities and organic search engine visibility to capture much more traffic for your site. This method of article creation also boosts the topical authority for SEO because your website demonstrates that it has expertise in all aspects of the subject matter.

4. Increased User Trust

The more readers trust your site as a source of authority on a chosen subject, the more likely they will return. That trust can turn into loyalty, which is essential. As long as you keep publishing new and helpful content, your readers should stay with you.

This also means they are more likely to share that content with others, which matters a lot for gaining natural backlinks and brand awareness. Backlinks are invaluable for improving your website’s off-page SEO signals (a top ranking factor for Google), so the more people link to your site as a trusted source, the better.

5. Longer Session Times

The more helpful content you can offer your visitors, the longer they’ll stick around on your site. Offering an array of interesting, useful, and practical articles will encourage users to keep clicking, thus increasing session times.

Of course, it goes without saying that the longer the session time, the more trust and familiarity will be built between you and your user base. This can increase the number of leads, customers, and sales, depending on what you’re offering. If you’re selling online courses, for example, users will be more likely to make a purchase if your site feels familiar to them and they are getting all of their questions answered through the various articles you’ve published on the site to increase topical authority for SEO.

6. Better On-Page SEO

When you focus on topical authority, it will naturally improve your on-page SEO. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages for specific keywords to enhance visibility in search engines.

On-page optimization includes focusing on areas like page titles, URL structure, meta tags, headers, page content, internal links, and images. And the more thoroughly you cover a specific topic on your site, the more images, meta tags, and header tags you will have, all with relevant keywords included.

Thinking about topical authority will mean adding tons of helpful, well-written, relevant content for your site visitors. This, in turn, improves your on-page SEO and can help your web pages to rank higher in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Topical Authority Is Important In SEO Summary

We hope you enjoyed this guide about why topical authority is important in SEO.

As you discovered, topical authority matters because it helps search engines understand the subject matter a website demonstrates expertise in, which correlates with a positive user experience. As a result, the importance of topical authority for SEO is that it gives your site a better chance to rank for topically related keywords.