Topical Maps: SEO & Topical Authority Course L1

- Mark Muller introduces a course about topical maps to his audience. The course covers how to build a full topical map, how to do the research collecting the data, what to write, and what to make the content brief. - A topical map gives you a list of articles that you should write and topics that should cover to be seen as an authority for your website in a specific industry. - A deep website architecture allows for the potential of better user satisfaction. It also allows for a deeper entity coverage which plays into Google's knowledge graph. - Speaker A introduces topical maps to the audience and asks them to leave a comment below what they thought about this topical map video and their biggest questions about topical maps.

Hello and welcome to this course about topical maps. In SEO, we will take you from knowing very little about topical maps to being able to build a full topical map yourself in the matter of about six YouTube videos. My name is Mark Muller and let's dive right in. So what's included in the course? In the first full session, we're going to talk about planning the size of your topical map that will include looking at competitors. What topics have they covered? How many articles have they written? The resources that you have available? Meaning, what funds do you have available to write the articles in your topical map? And then what goals do you have? Do you want to be the next Healthline website with thousands or millions of articles, or do you want to have a very niche focus and only write 30 articles for both? A topical map can help. In the second part of the course, we will look at how we can do the research collecting the data to build your topical map. Things like entities, Wikipedia, Google Search, console, Semrush, and also extracting competitor sitemaps are going to be part of the second video. In the third video, we'll go over the tools that you can use in order to build a topical map. Fourth video, keyword research and keyword clustering. We will use the avalanche theory to first publish articles that are easy to rank for so that you can accumulate data in Google's eyes and basically get user metrics and gain Google's trust slowly by first getting some visitors for easy to rank articles. Number five, what should a content brief look like? That's quite important because just having a huge map of articles that you could write doesn't really help. If you don't have a clear plan of what a content brief looks like, that can beat your competition. Because the goal here is not just to pump out a bunch of low quality articles. Every single article in the map needs to beat your competitors. Otherwise, if you publish articles that are of lower quality, that actually hurts your website's quality scores. So again, the goal here is not quantity, but quality and the content brief. What goes into each article is a big part of that. And then scheduling. How quickly should you be writing articles? Should you write 30 articles in a day? One article per week? If you have 100 articles ready to publish, should they all be published in a day or should you schedule them out? Three articles per week? We'll talk about all of that in the scheduling part. Now, this is the first video. So in this video I wanted to go over a few basic things about topical maps, such as definitions. What is a topical map so, topical map gives you a list of articles that you should write and a list of topics that you should cover to be seen as an authority for your website in a specific industry. It should also cover content briefs. A lot of times I see that people only do the first part, they only create the list of articles, but they don't really go into each content brief. And Corey Tuckburg has shown a really good example of the right way to do it, which actually does include the content briefs. Then what are the benefits of a topic? A map? So the main benefit that I see is that the pre planning of writing out all the articles that you want to cover gives you a competitive advantage because by default you've done more research in the possible articles that you can write. It allows you to find some articles that are very rarely covered, so you can immediately get clicks for those because they have a low competition score. And it also allows you to allocate your resources in a more efficient way. Meaning, rather than writing about random topics, you now have a clear plan of which topics you want to start writing about. Now, the downsides are that if you don't have the right budget or not good writing skills yourself or your copywriters lack the skills, then a topical map can actually hurt you because you might be publishing a lot of articles just because they're on that topical map. It says that you should publish them, but they're low quality. And what that means is that drags the overall quality scores of your website down. And now perhaps other pages are also not ranking well anymore. So if you had some service pages or some product pages, and these are fine, they're good pages. But now due to your topical map, you've published supporting articles. And those supporting articles of low quality, then that can be a real issue. And I've seen that a lot that people have thought, right, I would just publish good quality articles only for my money pages, my important service or category pages or product pages. And then for the supporting articles they've kind of skimmed out, they've hired cheap writers, didn't create any graphics for those articles, and that really hurt their website in the long term. So that's important to note. Do not publish any articles just for the sake of publishing them. They actually need to be quality work. So why do topical maps work? A general explanation is eat expertise, authoritativeness, and trust, which I'm not a fan of because it's trying to explain one concept by borrowing another concept that needs to be explained. So whether eat is actually a concept that works, or if it's just something that Google made up that's somewhat yet to be researched and proven. That's why I don't like the definition of saying topical maps work because eat. I think it has more to do with historical user data given a certain topic and Google's knowledge graph. Let's stick with the user data for a second. So if you imagine that you have currently no website and you're about to publish your first article and launch your website tomorrow, now the first article is going to establish in which industry Google is going to map you. And then the first visitor is going to be the first person essentially that Google can see in Google Analytics and through Chrome clickstream data and essentially get an idea of whether people actually like your website. That's quite important to Google because if they have no previous background on your website, they're not going to trust you for a topic straight away. And that first article allows you to gain that user data in Google system things such as how much time are people spending on your site? Are they clicking from the main article that they landed on further deeper into your website architecture? How long do people stay there? Are they completing actions such as downloading ebooks, subscribing and so on, or do they bounce back to search results? My point here is that by having a topical map, you allow for Google to collect more data on your website for a specific topic. So if you are Healthline, Google has data on millions of websites, visits probably each month going to Healthline. And people are fairly satisfied. They usually find what they're looking for in healthline. And the website therefore is trusted by Google. So having that topical map allows to build that trust for a specific topic because that's important. And it really is that topic specific trust, because if you're healthline, you couldn't tomorrow publish articles about buying a chair, for example, because that's outside of their topical expertise. Google doesn't have any user data based on buying a furniture because Healthline is a health website, if that makes sense. And I've definitely seen that on websites that I'm working with as well. If I post articles in a very specific topic that the website already has authority for, those articles rank really well. Anything outside of that takes a lot longer to rank. So the other point why a topical map might work is a deeper website structure which allows for the potential of better user satisfaction. So if you type the keyword in backlinks, very broad term, right? What do you mean? Do you want to have a guide for local SEO backlinks? Do you want an outreach backlink strategy. Do you want black hat, white hat backlinks and so on? So it's a fairly ambiguous term. So what helps Google there is if Google knows, right, this website covers everything about backlinks, from white hat to black hat, to outreach backlinks, to local SEO backlinks, to press release backlinks, everything. So now you have a lot more chance to satisfy that user because of that deep website architecture that every potential article and question is covered. And if the website is then laid out in a way that it's easy to navigate, Google can be fairly certain that if they send a user to that site for the keyword backlinks, they will find what they are looking for on that site. That's always better than backlinks. So having a deeper website architecture helps because you have more satisfaction potential for users. And again, that's on a certain topic and then also internal links. So this is simply, we know that internal links work, but they need to be from relevant pages, right? And the only way to get an internal link from a relevant page is again, to have that big topical map, that deep website architecture, so that you have 100 articles all about backlinks. And now these backlink articles can link to each other. It's also cheaper for search engines. This is also a concept that Corey Tuckburg has talked about, meaning when Google can rank one website for millions of queries such as Healthline, that's cheaper for them than visiting 3 million domains and having for each keyword showing a different domain. It also allows you to process all entities. So when you have a topical map that's well laid out, you will know the entities that you should be talking about, the attributes and their values. So that's the EaV model. Entity attribute value the entity here would be Michael Jordan. In this example, the attribute is his height and the value is 1 meter 98. So that would essentially tell you that you can lay out all of the entities that you want to cover on your site and therefore have a deeper entity coverage which plays into Google's knowledge graph. So in the background, Google also has an entry for the person, Michael Jordan, job title, ex basketball player, now manager of an NBA team, and all of these things, spouse, parents and so on, are all separate entities in Google system. And through the topic map, it allows you to configure your website so that it matches that entity configuration that Google has in a better way. As opposed to when you go without a topical map. You might be writing about one very small part that Google knows about, but you're missing that much because you haven't done the research and the things that you're talking about on your site are not quite fitting the knowledge graph that Google has. All right, so why do topical maps make no sense at all? Cool. So Google is asking us always to have expert writers, as suggested by the eat model, meaning that we should be having writers who have topical experience, ideally PhDs. If you're talking about medical research, it should be ideally written by a doctor. But that would mean that an electric scooter company who's an e commerce website just buying electric scooters from China and then selling them, needs to write about battery chemistry because that's what the topical map often calls for, because you need to cover the topic in as much depth as possible. It doesn't mean that you have 100 articles about battery chemistry if you are an electric scooter company. But you probably need one or two articles to show Google that you have experience and knowledge on that topic and to satisfy the knowledge graph criteria. Because Google would understand that somewhere connected to an electric scooter is the topic of batteries. And then connected to the topic of batteries, there's a topic of battery chemistry. And that doesn't make sense, right? Because if I'm a guy who's buying electric scooters from China, I have no idea about battery chemistry. I just know perhaps about shipping them to America or Australia and then building an e commerce site and selling them. I have no idea about chemistry whatsoever. Yet Google expects me to write an article on that. And Google doesn't say that, but it's certainly what Google is rewarding. So that's what I mean with it doesn't make sense. And I have an example to go in here. Now, this is a topical map from a website that Corey Tuckburg has openly discussed. It's one of his case study websites. And you can see here the job, the titles of the articles and then what job title would be an expert on that. So we have titles here such as the best non alcoholic summer drinks, a mixologist chef, and then here we have the field of science. Culinary arts would be something that that person might have studied. So the point here is that you can straight away see that there are quite a lot of very different job titles and fields of studies that the website owner would either need to know about himself. He would either need to be a doctor, an environmental engineer, a hydrologist, a nutritionalist, public health professional. Later on, we also have chemist. He would need to be all of those things to be able to write about that himself or he would need to hire PhD experts for all of these articles. Of course, that's not possible and nobody is doing that. And that's why we say the way that Google's knowledge graph works and therefore influences topical maps doesn't really make sense. All we know is that it works. And we can kind of guess that it's probably due to the fact of how Google has organized their knowledge graph. But yeah, here. So to give you the background story, if you're not familiar with the Svalbardi website, this is a luxury water company. They sell iceberg water and they have then written articles that quite deeply go into the medical field. So we have here 20 health benefits of drinking water, water retention, what percentage of the body is water, and these would be topics that doctors, potentially biologists talk about. And yet here is this water company who is publishing these articles and ranking quite well for a lot of them. So I find that interesting that this strategy actually works in a lot of cases. I've highlighted here in green the articles that Svalbardi is doing exceptionally well for. So these are where they have featured, featured snippets or are ranking in very high spots, things like fluid retention. How long can you survive without water? These are not questions that I would typically trust a water bottling company with. Right. Because that's essentially what this website is. Or this company. They take water from icebergs, put it into a bottle and then ship it to you. So why do they know about how long you can survive without water? Doesn't quite make sense to us humans, but to a search engine, it does make sense again due to the knowledge graph configuration. All right, I hope you enjoyed this first dive into topical maps. This video was just supposed to give you an overview of topical maps and perhaps why they work and why they can be a little bit quirky. I hope this was helpful. Leave a comment below what you thought about this topical map video and your biggest questions about topical maps. Thank you and I'll see you in the next video.