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This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 132. What is topical Authority? You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because a lot of people are confused about the topic of topical authority. So that's we're going to talk about in this episode. But before we do that, some reminders. New episodes come out at 9:00am Central Standard Time on Wednesday. That's for the podcast. If you're listening on YouTube, it's going to be a little bit after that. If you leave a comment on YouTube, I try to reply on Wednesday, but sometimes it's not until the Thursday. If you like the podcast on YouTube, please subscribe. That would be really helpful. If you have a question and you want to email me, you can email me at hello grumpy SEO guy.com if you'd like to ask a question to the Grumpy SEO Guy listeners, you can do that on Reddit@Reddit.com R Grumpy SEO guy, if you have a complicated question and would like to set up a zoom advisory call, you can email me and we can talk about getting that set up. And if you would like to support the podcast, you can do that@patreon.com grumpy SEO guy okay, onto the topic. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. So what is topical authority? Topical authority is basically relevancy. And we already have a lot of episodes that talk about relevancy. I will put links in the Description. But we're going to talk about it again on this episode. Okay, so what is relevancy? Relevancy just means what is the topic of your website? Okay. It's like, it's not even difficult. It just means what is the topic of your website? So if your website is about refrigerators, then you're relevant for refrigerators. If your website is about toasters, then you're relevant for toasters and so on. Does that make sense? Okay, so how do you get relevancy? There are two ways to get relevancy, and I will tell you what they are. One, you write about a topic. Really easy. If you write about refrigerators, you are relevant for refrigerators. If you write about toasters, you are relevant for toasters. All you have to do is write about a topic and you will have relevancy for that topic. Two, by getting backlinks with your keywords in the anchor text, it provides relevancy for that topic. Okay, so what does that mean? That means when somebody. A backlink is a link to your website from a different website, okay? When somebody links to you, if they have your keywords in the link, like if the link actually says your keywords, that is providing relevancy. Those are the two ways to get relevancy. Now, why does this even matter? Who cares what the relevancy is? Who cares? Okay, Let me tell you why. As you maybe know from listening to Grumpy SEO guy, there are four things you need to rank, okay? And we've got episodes that explain them. I will put links in the description, but I will also tell you what they are right now. Number one, don't get a penalty, okay? Number one, don't get a penalty. Please listen to episode two. It talks about different kinds of penalties and how to get them and how to not get them, okay? The highest priority in SEO is not getting a penalty, okay? So listen to that episode, because we're not gonna talk about it now. Number two, you need content, okay? The quality of content is not a ranking factor, okay? So you can write good content, you can write bad content. Doesn't matter, okay? Obviously, humans like good content better than bad content, okay? But search engines can't tell the difference. That's why they use authority instead. But it doesn't matter. So here's the point. You need content on your site because if you don't have content on your site, then you have a blank website, and that doesn't help people. Can you imagine searching for something, finding a website, clicking on it, and it's blank. No, well, you might be able to, like, picture that, but why? It would not be beneficial at all. So you need content on your site. So there is content, like, for people to see. But that's literally why you need content. Okay? Number three, you need relevancy. Okay? Relevancy, which we've been talking about, means what is the topic of your website? Okay? And as you know, because we literally just talked about it, there are two ways to get relevancy. Number four, you need authority. Authority is like trustworthiness, okay? Authority comes from backlinks. So a backlink, again, is when another website links to you, okay? Most websites on the Internet have differing levels of authority, from low to high, okay? And every time a website links to you, it shares some authority with you, okay? So the more. This is a very, very oversimplification, but the more authority your website has, the more authority a link to you will provide, okay? That doesn't mean that lower authority backlinks are not helpful. It just means that's how it works. So, like, getting low authority backlinks is also very helpful, okay? But anyways, look, so once you have those first three things in place, okay, no penalties, content and relevancy, then SEO is basically about getting as much authority as possible. Most of your time doing SEO, okay, if you are actually doing SEO, most of your time will be used getting backlinks, just FYI. Or building authority, which only comes from backlinks. To be clear, backlinks provide authority, Nothing else provides authority. Okay? Just to be very clear. Cause sometimes there's confusion about that and sometimes there are ideas posted online about other ways to get authority besides backlinks, but that's not right. Backlinks provide authority, nothing else provides authority. So anyways, once you have those first three things, get authority. So listen. But why, like, who cares? Like, right, like who cares? Cool, grumpy SEO guy, you told us all this stuff, but like, who cares? This is why you should care. This is the way it works, okay? Let's ignore penalties and content for now, okay? So this is how your position in the search engine results is determined. The first thing that is important is relevancy, okay? Relevancy means what is the topic of your website? Okay? So if you're. If you're relevant for toasters, then it's possible you can rank for toasters, okay? So here's how it works. When somebody searches for toasters, all of the websites on the entire Internet that are not relevant for toasters are excluded, okay? Because why would you show up in a result for toasters. If you're not relevant for toasters, right? Like, like why? Okay, let's take a step back even. Here's the reason that's important. Search engines want to deliver great results. The reason they want to deliver great results is because if they deliver great results that help you, you are going to keep using that search engine. If you keep using that search engine, you might occasionally click an ad. If you click an ad, the search engine makes money, okay? If they give you bad results, you're going to stop using that search engine. And then they're not going to ever make money because you're never going to click their ads because you're using a different search engine instead. Okay? So anyways, they want to deliver good, quality, relevant results to you. So anyways, somebody searches for toasters. Any website that is not about toasters will not be in the search results because they are not relevant. The websites that are relevant for toasters will be in the search results. Okay? Now they might not be on the first page, but they will be in the search results somewhere, okay? So that's why relevancy is important. Now we need to talk about authority. Authority determines what position you will appear in the results. Okay, so you've got all of these websites that are relevant for toasters, okay? But how are they positioned? The website with the most authority that is also relevant for toasters will be number one. The website with the second most authority that is relevant for toasters will be number two. Like that. Okay? So that's why you need relevancy and authority, but they're not enough by themselves. You can be super relevant for a topic, but if you don't have authority, you won't rank. And you can have lots of authority, but if you're not relevant for a topic, you won't rank for that topic. Does that make sense? Here's an easy way to think about it. Relevancy answers the question, will my website appear in the search results? Okay. Will my website appear in the search results? Now doesn't mean on the first page, but it means somewhere. If your website is relevant for a topic, it will appear in the search results. It will probably appear in the search. There's cases where it won't, but just go with me for now. Okay? If you're relevant for a topic, you will appear in the search results. Okay? Authority answers the question, what position will my website be in the search results? Okay? So if you're relevant for a topic and then you will be included in the search results and your authority will Be what decides where you appear or what position your website will appear in the search results. Does that make sense? So you can be relevant for a topic with low authority, and you probably will not appear on the first page. You can be relevant for a topic with lots of authority, and you probably will be at the top of the first page. So, anyways, I don't know if this is, like, helpful, but I hope it's helpful because that's what relevancy is, and that's how it works with authority. So there's one more thing that I want to say about relevancy, because I see this question frequently and we need to talk about it. So people have the question, how should I structure the content on my site? Okay, here's my advice for this topic. It is okay to have a lot of articles on your site, even if all those articles are on the same topic. But you don't want too many articles about exactly the same topic. So let's talk about toasters. Let's say your website talks about toasters. You know, you have a toaster website, okay? If you have an article about how to buy toasters, and you have an article about different colors of toasters, and you have an article about where to buy toasters, and you have an article about how to fix toasters, and you have an article about, I don't know, whatever else, what other. You get my point, right? Those are all about toasters. They're all relevant for toasters, but they're all different. Okay? Does that make sense? That is okay. What is not okay is when you have a lot of articles that are all on exactly the same topic, okay? If you have five articles on where to buy toasters, that's not good. That's gonna confuse the search engines, okay? And so that can create a problem called cannibalization. Okay? You might have heard of this before. So what that means is the search engine doesn't know which page on your site is supposed to rank for the keyword. So what happens is you'll have an article on your site that ranks for a keyword, okay? And then the next day, that article disappears and gets replaced in the search results by a different page on your site, okay? So now a different page is ranking for that keyword, and then the next day that page disappears and is replaced by a different page on your site in the search results and so on. Maybe it's replaced by the first page, maybe it's replaced by another page. But the point is, the search engines can't figure out which page is supposed to rank, so they kind of just like leap through them and they have one page rank and then it disappears and a different page ranks. And then it disappears and a different page ranks. And so the problem is that you're not getting viewers to the proper page because the page that's ranking on your site keeps changing. That is what it looks like. There are ways to fix it, but we will talk about those later. Okay, but that is why you want to not have too many articles that are on the same topic. Okay, so perhaps this answers your questions. And let me know if you have any other questions. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit or you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com if you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders, because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks, and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so@patreon.com grumpy SEO guy and I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday for another episode. Sam.