Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After going through this guide, you’ll know what topical relevance is and why it’s important, as well as how it’s realized online. You’ll also learn how to achieve topical relevance in your own content.
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3.6.1 What Is Topical Relevance?
Topical relevance is the importance and understanding of a website or page content to a reader’s interests. It’s one of the key factors that search engines consider when they rank how well your content addresses a user’s search intent.
A page’s topical relevance is based on three elements:
These elements, collectively, determine the authority a site enjoys on a particular topic. A camping publisher may be viewed as authoritative for beginner campers because it contains content and keywords geared towards their needs — “new to camping” articles that address how to set up a tent, for example.
As for backlinks, having a camping association linking to the camping publishers website bolsters the latter’s credibility.
These features will help to differentiate the publisher from other similar sites, especially those that don’t include keywords or content of interest to beginner campers. And such differentiation, in turn, can improve the ranking of the site when a beginner camper searches for instructions on how to set up a tent.
Topical relevance is important for two reasons. First, by ensuring that your content is relevant to your target audience’s interests — and by providing such content regularly — you’ll be establishing the foundation for ongoing quality traffic to your site.
But providing quality content regularly is only half of the job, the other half involves helping your target audience discover it. Google and other search engines reward sites that give people what they’re looking for and, if your content is covering keywords, content and backlinks, then it’s likely to turn up on page 1 of your readers’ search results.
Topical relevance is realized when a search engine correctly connects a search query to web pages that cover that specific topic.
A person searching for information about India’s iconic Taj Mahal mausoleum, for example, isn’t looking for search results on American blues musician Taj Mahal. Search engines try to determine the relevance of each result by looking at the context of the search query to decipher whether the query refers to the monument or the musician.
While Google has stacked the first page for the short-tailed “Taj Mahal” query with results for the famous site, it has still included a single breakout result for the singer.
Google has pioneered the evolution of search engines to be able to identify topical relevance, and this is best seen in the development of its Knowledge Graph. A vast database, the Knowledge Graph categorizes people, places, organizations and things (as well as other definitive and abstract things — such as animals, machines and occupations), as “entities’.
Based on both long-term and the latest search patterns for specific entities, it then develops an understanding of the relationships between different entities and, therefore, the relevance of some content to other content.
For example, if a person searches “Luke Skywalker”, at the top of their results will show other potential results all tied to the Star Wars franchise, such as the actor that played the character.
Such results are based on Google’s analysis of previous Luke Skywalker searches and demonstrate how the engine has recognized the relevance between the Luke Skywalker entity and the Star Wars entity.
So what’s critical to creating relevant content for your readers? Here are some key pointers.
Using the right keywords can make or break your content, and one of the easiest ways to find the right ones is to scroll down to the bottom of the first search engine results page (SERP).
It’s there that you’ll find words that might be relevant to your main content. In our “Luke Skywalker” example, the character’s iconic “lightsaber” might be a handy keyword, depending on the planned content. Another keyword might be “father”, given that the arch-villain in the Star Wars franchise, Darth Vader, is actually Luke’s father.
However, for more systematic keyword research we’d recommend using tools like Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere or Answer the Public.
To learn more about keyword research as a concept, then check out our module on the subject. Alternatively, for a more hands-on approach to the process you can review our detailed guide.
As important as they are, the right keywords can only take you so far. Another critical stage in building topical relevance is to incorporate such words into new content that’s published regularly.
Nothing beats the appeal of new information about a popular topic, and providing such information will ensure that your site or page consistently performs well in the SERPs. How often you publish new content isn’t necessarily the dealbreaker here. Rather, it’s the fact that you publish it like clockwork, and consistently.
Another practice worth applying is expanding content variety. Monthly posts on marketing automation might be helpful for your readers, but accompanying such posts with, say, short weekly success stories on automation could add another layer of value to the content you’re already providing.
How you expand your content will depend on what your readers need, but the spectrum of possibilities can include anything from opinion pieces and product reviews to how-to videos and podcasts.
For more on the power of regularly publishing comprehensive content, check out our content velocity module.
This point goes hand-in-hand with developing a sound structure for your site. A topic cluster centers around a pillar page, which contains introductory information about a topic.
Once readers have read a pillar page’s info, they can then click on links that lead them to supporting pages that contain info on related sub-topics. Each cluster page is linked back to the pillar page as well as to other support pages. The pillar page and its supporting pages form a topic cluster.
There are a couple of key benefits to organizing your content in this way. First, pillars and clusters help search engines better understand the topical relevance of clustered content, building your site’s topical authority. Secondly, from a user experience (UX) perspective, content clusters help your readers find information more easily on your site.
For a more detailed examination of content clusters, head to our dedicated module on the subject.
Once the non-negotiables are in place, try implementing the following practices to further improve topical relevance.
Your home page, pillar pages and other key pages are where most of your readers are likely to gravitate towards. Because of this, where appropriate, it’s worth linking content on these pages to similar content on less trafficked pages, as this will indicate to search engines that the lesser viewed content is relevant to your readers’ interests.
By doing this regularly, you’ll reinforce both the high-profile nature of both your key pages as well as the value of less viewed pages, which should help the search engine better rank your content.
For a detailed investigation into the power of interlinks, check out our module on interlinks as well as our guide to the pillar-cluster content strategy.
We’ve touched on how tools such as Keywords Everywhere and Answer the Public can help you to zero in on the keywords you need for your content.
The analytical bedrock of such tools is natural language processing (NLP), a field of linguistics that studies communication between humans and computers. The application of NLP in computing has allowed computers to understand written communication — such as a search engine query — from its context.
A simple example would be the key role that the words “the” and “monument” play in assisting a computer to relate the search query “the Taj Mahal monument” to the famous tourist attraction and not, say, an American blues musician.
There are many NLP-guided tools that can help you create relevant content for your readers. Some, such as seoClarity’s Content Fusion and Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant, boast various sophisticated metrics. Others, such as Surfer SEO and MarketMuse, offer handy live feedback as you write your content.
Whichever tool you use, the time you invest in researching the right one will pay dividends on your content.
Here are some common mistakes to avoid making when you’re creating and managing your content.
It can be tempting to include content that’s a little sensational or even a tad deceitful – after all, if it appeals to people’s curiosity, then it’s bound to drive traffic to your site. However, the popularity of sensational or misrepresentative content rarely lasts and, if you do use such content, you’ll likely be left with content that doesn’t align with what’s on the rest of your site.
To avoid this, stay focused on the long-term goals for your content, and avoid the lure of what seems popular but, in fact, will probably do more harm than good.
This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how easy it can be to include irrelevant content over time.
As you expand your content, you’ll no doubt be keen to include various sub-topics that could increase your visitor numbers. But as you’re developing new sections and pages, always ask whether your visitors are really interested in this content. Will this new content increase the value of what you’re already offering?
If the answer to this question is “no”, then it’s best to leave the new content out.
At other times, what was once of interest to your readers may no longer be, and this highlights the importance of regular pruning — reviewing your content and removing any parts that are no longer needed.
Here are two case studies of sites where the steps we’ve discussed in this article have been implemented.
Tourism Western Australia (TWA) is responsible for promoting Western Australia as a tourist destination. A quick review of Scarborough Beach reveals a number of key features.
As you go through the content of the page, you realize that it talks about different aspects of Scarborough Beach. It talks about The location, so the address. It talks about different associated aspects of Scarborough Beach, i e, the Scarborough Beach pool. It also talks about things that are related to features and benefits of Scarborough Beach. So for example, the Geothermally heated open air public pool. It’s the recreation facility, accessibility, all of which helps show the research and NLP that’s required to build up the keywords for the page publishing regularly and extensively.
As with other tourism sites, TWA’s site is rich in information about various festivals and other events. The “EVENTS” section provides the latest information about performances that will be held each month and includes an easy-to-navigate calendar.
TWA also demonstrates its social responsibility by publishing the latest Covid-19 travel information — content that, given the subject matter, will be reviewed and updated regularly in case of changes to public health policy.
On TWA’s home page, the “PLACES TO VISIT”’ heading leads us to a directory page, from where we can explore Western Australia through cluster pages.
Treehugger, which promotes environmental awareness and sustainability, provides the latest news and information on topics such as climate change, building eco-friendly homes and how to grow your own food.
Looking closely at the site’s homepage we can see a number of best practices being employed.
Treehugger’s audience is mainly people who are not only interested in environmental matters but who are already familiar with specific areas concerning the environment and want to learn more about them. This is evident in article titles such as “28 Green Gifts for the Holidays” and “What Is Ecotourism”.
In this sense, Treehugger is not only relevant to people who seek an introduction to environmental issues – as reflected in the use of general keywords such as “sustainability” and “eco-design” – but also to those who seek practical advice on, in this case, sustainable Christmas shopping and vacations.
Publishing Regularly and ExtensivelyTreehugger aims to keep its readers up to date with the latest developments concerning the environment, and it achieves this through its “News” section.
Here, readers can browse articles — which are published almost daily — on topics from business and policy to science and animals.
From the top of the home page, you can click on the “Home & Garden” heading, which leads you to the category page.
Here, you’ll find various support pages clustered together under sub-categories such as “Green Living” and “Planting Guides”. With such an arrangement, a given article or topic cluster is only a click away for interested readers.
After working through this guide, you should understand what topical relevance is, why it’s important and how it’s realized.
You should also be familiar with the practices that are critical to creating relevant content, as well as some of the pitfalls to avoid when you’re putting together your content. Finally, you should have an understanding of how to apply the recommended practices and be in a position to begin doing so on your site.
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