Let's Talk
Content and strategy

Topical authority

Topical authority is the idea that a site seen as a strong source on a subject ranks more easily for searches about it.

SEO practitioners build it by covering a subject in depth, linking those pages together, and earning mentions and links from other sites in the same field.

Google has named a topic authority system, but only for news. Its May 2023 post on news topic authority describes a system that helps surface expert publications for news searches in areas such as health, politics and finance. The signals it lists include how well known a source is for a topic or location, how often others cite it, its original reporting and its reputation. When SEO tools and blogs talk about topical authority for B2B sites, they mean a wider idea that Google hasn’t described in those terms.

Why the idea still holds for B2B

The broader idea is sound even without a named Google system behind it. Google’s ranking systems judge pages on relevance and reliability, and a site that covers a subject thoroughly gives them more to work with: more pages that match related searches, more internal links that show how those pages connect, and more reasons for other sites to cite it.

Depth works for sites that commit to a defined niche. It doesn’t work for a site that publishes a few posts on twenty topics, or for a small site where forcing a dozen thin pages onto one topic produces repetition rather than depth. For a B2B company with a clear focus, building out one subject at a time is still the most reliable way to rank across a market rather than for single keywords.

For a Canadian managed service provider, restructuring the site into content silos gave each service a group of supporting pages and moved its target keywords up. For an AI-native managed security provider, a cybersecurity glossary and a scheduled internal linking calendar built depth around each service.

Topical authority and authority metrics

Domain Authority and Domain Rating are link-based scores from Moz and Ahrefs. They measure links to the whole site, not depth on a subject, and Google doesn’t use either one.

Common mistakes

  • Claiming Google has a general topical authority ranking system.

  • Publishing many thin pages on one subject and calling it depth.

  • Covering a subject well without linking the pages together.

  • Spreading content across unrelated topics.