Topical Authority and Content Architecture

byArcherGreen

273 followers

10 months ago

Last week I watched a training video on wealthyaffiliate.com that talks about how to generate traffic to one's website/blog. The main idea that was presented in that video is how to establish topical authority.

I started implementing the concepts by finding a keyword with an acceptable amount of traffic and low competition. The training suggested that one should write 10 articles around this keyword.

I was not sure whether all ten articles should include the keyword in the title or the keyword should be in one article and the other nine articles should have this keyword included in the content.
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I went to my friend ChatGPT and asked for its explanation on topical authority. The idea explained was to create what is called a pillar article that talks about the topic of the keyword in general mentioning all subtopics.

Then create nine articles, each dedicated to covering one of the subtopics. All nine should link back to the pillar article and the pillar article links to each of the nine subtopic articles.

Then an idea came to my head that this is like creating a tree of topics. Meaning, that even a subtopic can become a pillar and create deeper subtopics for it. This made my brain explode with ideas.f

Then I remembered that there was an old term which I knew but forgot all about it. The term is content architecture. A website's content should be planned for before starting publishing.

A decision should be made about the main pillar or pillars of the website. Then start searching for keywords for the first pillar. Then create the tree of that first pillar, then move to the next. This is of course one way of approaching it. There could be several content creation and publishing strategies, but they all depend on the planned structure around the topics that the website owner wants to establish authority on.

As we mentioned earlier, even a first subtopic can become a pillar by establishing its own subtopics, and the website owner is free to go as deep as he/she wants in the structure.

I wish I had this knowledge at the beginning. The training received talked about searching for keywords, and writing one article per keyword and encouraged using internal linking, but there was no mention of content structure and how it can be used to enhance indexing and position in the search engine by achieving topical authority.

Well, better late than never. I appreciate the fact that by watching only the first video in the traffic generation section of the WA training, all these plans started to formulate in my head.

I have now the first topic that I want to achieve topical authority on and will see how I can create from the subtopics deeper pillar articles with their own supportive subtopics.

I think the concept of creating topical authority and planning the blog architecture should be introduced in simple steps in the core training at WA. This concept can be expanded upon within the traffic training section.