How to Outrank Competitors with Topical Authority

Learn the exact steps to creating topical authority in your niche

What is topical authority?

Topical authority is a ranking factor where Google rewards your site for having deep expertise in a specific field. You should try to achieve topical authority because it'll help you outrank your competitors even if they have higher domain authority and more backlinks.

A perfect example of this is SearchEngineLand vs Mailchimp. Even though Mailchimp has lot more backlinks, SearchEngineLand consistently ranks higher for SEO related keywords because they are topically relevant to their site.

How to create topical authority

1. Identifying your niche

First you need to pick the niche you want to build topical authority for. I recommend something that is closely related to your product or service otherwise the traffic won't convert to actual customers. You need to remember that traffic on it's own is just a vanity metric.s

The main niche keyword should be pretty broad, an example would be "Outbound Sales"

2. Finding the right keywords

Our strategy to create topical authority won't be ranking for the most searched keywords.

Instead we'll pick the most narrow keywords in our niche and create as much high-quality content as possible.

You can use tools like AnswerThePublic to find the right keywords. Just enter your niche and it'll give you questions, comparisons and all sorts of keyword ideas.

3. Organize content into topical clusters

Create a pillar page for your niche, this would be "Beginner's Guide to Outbound Sales" in our case.

Next you have to create a lot of narrowly focused content that is related to the pillar page. Our example would be "What is cold email", "What is cold calling", etc. Try to cover as many of these as possible.

The final step to create a topical cluster is to interlink all of these pages. So all of these pages should link back to the pillar page and vice versa.

Here's a nice visual example by Hubspot:

4. Create high-quality content

The last thing we have to do is to create the actual content.

There's a neat trick I use to make sure my content aligns perfectly with the search intent for each keyword. As you might know, I'm a big advocate for using AI to create content but using the raw output from ChatGPT will never work.

Instead I always grab the top 3 results from Google and give those as extra content to the AI. This method has proved successful for me in the past and made one of my blog posts rank on page one in less than 24 hours.

I've made a another blog post about this: How to create blog posts with DeepSeek V3

Conclusion

Most people think that you can only outrank your competitors by having more backlinks.

I hope that this post has shown you that there's another way to do it.

Get started today by picking a niche and creating A LOT of content.

Thanks for reading.