← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
The Power Of Effective Topical Authority
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- [00:00]
Bridget Hole
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com Bridget Hole, CA Customer.
- [00:25]
Jordan Cooney
Service Number Highway Miles to the gallon.
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Tony Pataky
Ford Focus Thailand Cave Rescue Operation what is Schema?
- [00:32]
Jordan Cooney
M Best Wine bars in San Carlos, California Best Western Hotels how old is Ronaldo?
- [00:38]
Tony Pataky
What happened with Big Brother? How long before a wedding should I send out the first series to check email on other email clients identify fonts.
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Jordan Cooney
From where to Find.
- [00:52]
Bridget Hole
Welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast and I Hear Everything Production. In this podcast we'll share the news, knowledge and strategies you need to navigate the ever changing world of SEO. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast.
- [01:15]
Jordan Cooney
Jordan Cooney hello SEOs, My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible and this week we're going to discuss Mastering International and Topical Authority in SEO. Joining me is Tony Pataky, who is a Director of SEO and Marketing Performance at Procore Technologies, which provides cloud based construction software to clients across the globe. Yesterday Tony and I talked about successfully localizing international SEO content and today we're going to continue our conversation by discussing the power of effective topical authority.
- [01:53]
Tony Pataky
This podcast is also sponsored by ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT okay.
- [03:12]
Jordan Cooney
Here'S my conversation with Tony Pataki, the director of SEO and Marketing performance at Procore Technologies. Tony, welcome back to the Voice to Search podcast.
- [03:22]
Tony Pataky
Thanks for having me here, Jordan.
- [03:24]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. So we're going to dive into a new topic today, topical authority. But before we do that, yesterday we had an awesome episode on localization, international efforts. We covered the gamut from technical to content planning to truly, what I think is at the ethos of excellent internationalization, which is building a whole experience that truly fits the consumer and the audience in a given market, language and culture and custom. And I think you did a phenomenal job going through that. And so if you didn't listen to yesterday's episode, please go back and give that a listen. But today we're going into topical authority. And, you know, before we get into that, I think that there's a lot of misnomers, and I'm going to start this episode with a bit of a curveball, Anya, which is, do we really need topical authority in a world of AI? Is topical authority a real thing anymore? Or has AI changed the way we think about what a topic is and how we create the effectiveness or the efforts to control or own a topic?
- [04:33]
Tony Pataky
I love this question. AI. AI. Sometimes. Some days I'm just sick of hearing about AI, but at the same time.
- [04:39]
Jordan Cooney
You gotta love it.
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Tony Pataky
There's so many things that are just changing with AI. I mean, I think today, what did I see today? It was like this sono. Have you heard of this? Of, like, you can create movies just by like.
- [04:50]
Jordan Cooney
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard about that. Yeah. Yeah. You create text to video from OpenAI. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing.
- [04:56]
Tony Pataky
And it's amazing. It is amazing. Like some of those, I couldn't believe it's AI and it's creeping into content all over. I mean, I'm sure you've seen all this stuff on Twitter with, like, was it the SEO heist thing? I don't know if you've saw that and then how that, like, just ran into the ground. But yeah, topical authority. It's interesting you bring up AI with this because it's going to be interesting to see how people react to AI in the long term. Right? Right now it's fun. It's a cool, cool thing. But when it comes to topical authority, will you really trust in AI in certain topics versus a something that you've already connected with. Right? And that's where I feel like what brands come in, where you have that brand trust, that brand that you follow or you had good experience with and you keep going back to that as like the main source of information. There are some places where AI can compete, but when it's something really important, I would rather trust a source that I have known does great content versus AI that pulls from everywhere on the Internet. And if really think about the average content quality on the Internet is not exactly where, you know, would I be pulling from for something that's really important for me. Right? Like when I learn about SEO, for example, there are few people I listen to, but 99% of it is just all noise.
- [06:14]
Jordan Cooney
So Tony, I mean, one of the things when we think about topical authority that is really, I think a challenge in the SEO space is that we typically think about it as competition that we think about. In order for me to really understand topical authority, I need to do some sort of competitive analysis. I need to see what everyone else is doing, how they're ranking, how long their content is, that they used a keyword 17.9999-9879 times, and that, that is how I'm going to make topical authority work. Tell me, is that really true? Is that how you have to make topical authority work is through that like competitive lens?
- [06:53]
Tony Pataky
I think it's important to take a look at what the market looks like, right? Take a look at all your competition, what are they ranking for? So you know what the size looks like, the opportunity is. But for me, the way I look at topical authority, it's more towards making sure that you have fully written about an entire subject matter, if that makes sense. Like you've really reached all those follow up questions. If I were to join the website at any point of this educational journey, I have all the steps I could go back, all the steps I could go forward and also linearly. So if I kind of looked at this educational journey as some kind of like a, like a funnel almost, right? You're hitting all the topics before, after and so on. So basically topical authority, the best, or like the simplest way I could put it is imagine if you had that ultimate textbook for that topic and it hits everything. That's when I think you start reaching topical authority is you rank for everything a hundred percent.
- [07:52]
Jordan Cooney
I love that concept of coverage, right? Because I agree with you. It's not just about what the competition's doing, it's a factor in your decision making. But if you don't have the coverage, the topical coverage and coverage is something that's changing all the time, not just based on what competitors are doing, but what consumers want. And I think that's what's really interesting. You know, one of the things that we did recently was an SGE report. It just so happened to be for a SaaS business where we looked at the top 500 keywords for that SaaS business, the most important thing that we looked at was when did Google actually trigger automatically SGE versus you had to engage it through a click. And what it told us was that Google really is dealing with this topic very differently than ones where it automatically wants to give you an answer. It automatically wants to give you some choices, which is the auto SGE engagement. Right. And how you built topical authority around the ones where Google did not engage, that was far more unique than the ones where they did. Right. Those were much more challenging areas to write about than in the areas where Google was automatically showing sge. Not to bring back the AI conversation again, but it's an important thing in terms of how we learn, in terms of seeing how these language models are determining topics and the authority or the data that they want to consume behind them. Around topical authority, though, as we continue to go into the effectiveness of the work that we do, I'd like to understand what are some of the measurements or what are some of the KPIs you try to look at when you're doing your SEO work to understand the topic or understand how authoritative a particular website might be for a given topic.
- [09:34]
Tony Pataky
Yeah, a lot of those questions can be broken into like a separate, like work sessions, age old CEO question.
- [09:39]
Jordan Cooney
Right. Why am I not ranking number one?
- [09:43]
Tony Pataky
How do you know when you've made it? I think that's like one question, right? Like I say a lot of people, like, when do we reach it? Like, okay, well we'll talk about that.
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Jordan Cooney
In a little bit, but give me another six months.
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Tony Pataky
Exactly, exactly. Like, when is this going to turn into money? Just give me a second. Yeah, so the when do you know when you've made it? And then also like, how do you plan? Like, what does that roadmap look like? And we kind of already touched on that. A little bit of like, you know, you do competitive analysis, see what topics they have reached and kind of building that educational journey in that specific topic area. You build out the content calendar and you will reach a point where it's like, I've hit this quite well, but actually, let me take a step back if I can, because I Think that when people are like, hey, I want to build. Here's a conversation I had with someone. It's like, I want to build topical authority in fitness because I want to do like affiliate marketing or something like that. Oh, that's a good idea. It's pretty competitive. And then they're like, well, I wrote a blog post about, like, nutrition and then kettlebells and squats and impressives. Like, how else should I approach this? Right now you're peppering everything. Like, topical authority is not. You want to take one step deeper. Let's start with kettlebells, because that was one of the things that they brought up. Start with kettlebells and build topical authority in that first, you have plenty to write about. What are kettlebells? Why use them? Intro to exercises, you know, what are different types, all that good stuff. So top of authority starts down there. You don't tackle like a topic and just like, you know, hit everything. So once you could build the educational journey for kettlebells first, that would be a more sound and better strategy to reach the topical authority to eventually hit fitness. Because fitness, it's a huge area, gigantic. You got to pick something within fitness, whether it's nutrition or like strength or like, whatever.
- [11:32]
Jordan Cooney
Let's double click on that real quick. Let's stay with this kettlebell concept and this fitness concept. Like, what are some of the metrics or KPIs within kettlebells? Or even what are some of the data points, assets you might look at? Like, people also ask or suggested search or other things. What are you going to look at to really understand kettlebells? So you can go down. Right, and understand that topic.
- [11:54]
Tony Pataky
Yeah, I love this. So, like, and we touched on competitive analysis. You want to, you know, start typing, find out who's already ranking for these kids and put it into your tools and start, start doing some gap analysis and you start just collecting basically a big group of just like keywords, right? And then you can do your seed keyword stuff, which is also cool. That gets you a lot of data. So I always recommend doing that. But before you go into seed keyword analysis, this is going back to AI a good way of doing something. Like, I always like doing this prompt, especially with like, subject matters. I'm still kind of learning more about is like, I'll tell ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, write me the table of contents of a textbook that's around this subject talking about xy, you know, give me the ultimate textbook around kettlebells, whatever it might be starting from, like, what Are they all the way to like, you know how to use and all that stuff. And they'll give you like this cool outline. It's like it's going to have some areas in there that you didn't think of before. Most likely I didn't think of before and maybe even your competitors haven't thought about before. And you can start using those as ideas for your seed keywords, right? You start taking those, typing them Google like see who else is ranking for that. And then you have this huge list of keywords and then you start breaking into that journey. And that journey is important, breaking into phases, whether you want to work your way from top down or down up. You know, going from bottom up is usually a little bit easier when it comes to internal linking and everything else. Like, you know, every time you work your way back one step, then you can, you know what to link to and then go about it that way. But you have this list of keywords you have. You want to cluster the keywords, of course, of like, you know, putting them into clusters of different topics. Where are they in that educational journey. And eventually you'll have everything kind of organized into kind of like a linear journey, so to speak, right? And within that there's branches coming out and all that stuff. But now you have your goal. I got to hit all these, like I go for all these. And now going back to what you were asking of like, well, what about people? When you're building your content briefs, right, you're creating like a strategy for each piece of content you're looking at the people also ask, making sure that you should touch on those within your content piece and really looking at your competitors like, did I touch on all the things I should be touching on with topical authority? It's absolutely critical to have your internal linking strategy downright because Google's looking at your page and looking at are you also answering the follow up questions? And those follow up questions can be links to other articles. So you need to hit all those.
- [14:17]
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you could work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now, do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's Integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Physical's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Pre Visible IO. That's Pre Visible P R E V I S I b l e.IO.
- [15:45]
Jordan Cooney
It'S all that relationship through the linking, but having the content. But let's stay on the content for just one second because I have a very important question on that which is in the content and in what you produce to be authoritative in a topic. I often get this question which is like Jordan, you're an SEO, you don't know anything about healthcare, you don't know anything about software, you don't know anything about travel. And the list goes on and on and on because you know, we work with all kinds of companies in all kinds of different verticals. And so the question is, do you have to be an expert in a vertical to create topical authority in your content?
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Tony Pataky
Interesting. So I would say the way I always work with content because I want to make sure that always the best gets out there. I always work with experts, people who are experts. I can kind of provide what the outline looks like, what are the key topics or questions that people are asking to touch on those. But in the end the experts are what brings additional value. Now to answer your question more directly, no, you don't have to. And you see plenty of examples of that out there of like SEOs, they're just looking at different competitors, whatever. And they're writing this content piece with writers who don't really know much about the topic. And they're not experts, but they're ranking well. So you can gain authority, but it's not going to be for long because the people who are using experts are going to eventually win. People who are building those great experiences are going to win because honestly, the experts are the ones who know exactly what you should be adding there that additional oomph to your content that will outrank the things that will Kind of like, how should I say, written by SEOs, not by experts.
- [17:27]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I mean, we did ruin the Internet, at least according to some sources. So, you know, maybe that is correct. Maybe we should stick to using experts, since the rest of us ruined the Internet by publishing a bunch of trash. But going back to the previous piece, to this conversation, which was internal linking. Tell me more about that. And tell me more about how internal linking plays a role in building that power of topical authority. Right? Like, why is that the component that really drives the power behind topical authority?
- [18:00]
Tony Pataky
Yeah, this almost kind of also touches on like, what we were talking about yesterday with, like, the localizing the experience of, you know, having those internal links. What you're basically doing is doing a choose your own journey, right? Because someone could be coming into a piece of content and they might be further in the educational process than earlier. Whatever it might be having links within your content that moves you forward in the educational journey, moving you back in the educational journey, but also linearly to kind of have like other content pieces that keep touching on that very, very topic that you're writing about. So having the interconnectivity always gives options to someone to, you know, it answers that, what next? Like, I love. That's what I love about, like, WebMD, right? Like, you go to WebMD and you're clicking around and like an hour later you're like, well, I'm still here. And it doesn't look too good, but they have this internal linking journey that they have where it just keeps you on the site and provides a really good experience. And that's basically what Google wants to see. Someone comes to your website, you're. They're staying there and they're finding a great piece of content after another written by experts is what I would recommend. And you stay on that and it sees what that content, Google has that whole mapping and it sees like, this website has the perfect textbook on this subject. This is a good place to send people.
- [19:17]
Jordan Cooney
Yep. And my last question, it's just as meaty and heavy as some of the others I've asked. But, Tony, you've had great responses. And I think this is probably the most important, important of the questions that I have around topical authority, and that is as search behavior and as the algorithm and the SERP is evolving, how are our efforts in making topical authority, in controlling topical authority going to change?
- [19:45]
Tony Pataky
Yeah, I wish I had data around how much people are using AI, because that's something I think we're all waiting for. Right. It's like, how much People actually using that versus, you know, like Google. Like is Google actually losing searches going to AI? Right, That's a big question. And I'm sure they are. They are. Which we just. I haven't seen any analytics around AI in general. I think that right now the pendulum has swung towards the AI, but I do believe that eventually it will swing back. And what I mean by that is that, you know, topical authority is really important for ranking and it's also really important for connecting with your audience and getting them to come back. Because people do connect with brands, right? Emotionally and everything, they trust brands and everything else. But when you have something that's just like an AI where just like nothing behind it, it's kind of hard to trust something that you don't even know where this came from. So I think where the big differentiator is going to continue to be is that brand connection with the users, building a good experience, building that brand experience with your target audience and the expertise. You can have a very consistent, high level expertise in your content. Right. Working with the right process and everything else. And that's something like, you know, we really strive to do is making sure we give the best experience and help our users. I think that it's gonna take a long time for AI to get there because there's so many questions and everything else and it's pulling stuff from the Internet and you're some of the responses. A lot of the responses I get back within AI is mediocre, especially when asking about topics. So I'm not afraid just yet of AI taking over. I think there's companies out there are still gonna, but we'll see how they adjust. Because I think people behind AI know there needs to be something that people can need that they can connect with. Because you can't connect with just like ChatGPT, like there's nothing behind it.
- [21:39]
Jordan Cooney
Like. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big things too around topical authority is just the way users behave with your content will likely dictate how the related content to that topic is going to perform. Right?
- [21:55]
Tony Pataky
Yeah.
- [21:56]
Jordan Cooney
So you may be able to get the click, but if consumers end up on your page unsatisfied or unfulfilled and return to Google to do subsequent searches on a topic, it means that you didn't do a good enough job fulfilling that need and either passing them throughout the rest of your site. So navigating related content, all those kinds of things, getting the right links, embedded links within your content to push a user who's actually exploring this topic further into your site, thus keeping them on your site. If they're returning to Google to do that next search to understand something, you've missed the mark. Right. And I think that is literally one of our best signals today in maintaining topical authority.
- [22:36]
Tony Pataky
Yeah, just to expand on that real quick because great point. Like, exactly. Like, Google will reward those where people stay on your site. Like, you know, someone comes to your site, they stay there, eventually Google's going to reward that. Right. And of course there's people probably behind their computers or phones right now thinking like, oh, but I know for this keyword, so many websites rank that are just horrible. And you're right, there's always exceptions. But Google's striving to make sure that, you know, dux is great on Google, sending people to great sites, because that's what keeps people coming back to Google. Then they can charge more for ads. You know, all that good stuff. But I was getting into this like, how do you know when you have topical authority and what are the big changes you see when you do the how do you know when you're done thing? Like when you first go into a topic, let's just say you're going into insurance or finance, right? Your money, your life. Like something super competitive at the very beginning, it takes a while for things to rank and it takes a while for you to get traffic. You have forecasts of your content maturing at 12 months, 16, 18 months of actually getting up there to maximizing the traffic potential. But as you build topical authority, what you'll start seeing is that for that specific topic, Google is going to be crawling those pages a lot more frequently. They index almost immediately. It's insane. We see we'll have content that we'll publish one day, by next day, it's already ranking. By end of week, it's, it's creating pretty substantial traffic super quick because it's like pro core, you guys are experts in this and this and this. We fly to page one for keywords super fast. You know, like how in, like in, in SEO, a lot of people say like, oh, it's gonna take about three, six months to get traffic. Or like, not for us. For us it's like, unless, like we hit goals super fast because we built topical authority in a lot of areas. And the same thing happened in cybersecurity and other places that I've worked at is like, once you got that, you rank super fast and you're able to compete for the super competitive keywords. The keywords where if you look at the cost per click. And it's a high dollar value. It's like, you know, that's super competitive, right? It's got a high cost per click because it converts. And you know, people are not going to pay for keywords that don't convert. So once you're kind of like dominating those, and that kind of goes down to those solution pages and product pages we were talking about yesterday of like, you'll be dominating those and dominating those keywords even in your educational content where it's super competitive. And those are your big signals of like, yeah, we got topical authority here 100%.
- [25:07]
Jordan Cooney
And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voice to Search podcast. Thank you to Tony Pataki, Director of SEO and Marketing Professional Performance at procore Technologies, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Tony, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his company website, procore.com okay, thanks to.
- [25:27]
Tony Pataky
Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.