Building topical authority for a website can be a really complex process. You can break down a complete topical map into:
- Source context
- Central search intent
- Central entity
- Core section
- Outer section
And it can involve understanding:
- Contextual coverage
- Content configuration
- Contextual flow
- Contextual hierarchy
- Contextual vectors
And more…
But what if you don’t know what any of that means?
Well for 90% of cases, you can use this simple hack to help you figure out what topics you should be covering.
- First Google your primary keyword, for example “agile project management”.
- Copy the #1 ranking domain not named Reddit from the search results.
- Use that domain (note you want to use the root domain, not necessarily the URL that was ranking) and go to Google.com to search:
site:domain.tld + keyword
For example, site:atlassian.com project management
This will give you the primary pages (and topics) they have published that Google sees as most relevant to your primary keyword. These are the pages that helped push them to #1 in the rankings.
Repeat these steps with the top 3-5 ranking websites and you will end up with a pretty solid topical map to start building content for.
