Topical relevance is a process search engines use to determine how relevant a web page is to a user's search query. It is usually based on a combination of factors, including but not limited to content, backlinks and keywords.
Why is Topical Relevance Important?
Topical relevance is important, because it helps inform Google crawlers on the reliability and authority of a website.
If a page has a bunch of links pointing to it from random, low-quality sites, this won’t reflect well on your website.
Similarly, receiving backlinks from popular websites with a high level of authority in their niche will help improve a website’s own page authority and boost its ranking in SERPs.
Equally, content that is optimised with relevant and targeted keywords, and goes into depth on a particular topic will also be rewarded with high ranking in SERPs.
How Can You Optimise Your Website for Topical Relevance?
There are a few different ways that you can optimise your website for topical relevance, these include:
1. Quality Keyword Research
This is essential for topical relevance. Conducting in-depth and quality keyword research will help you identify your audience and attract them to your website.
Key components of this are discovering keyword difficulty, keyword popularity as well as identifying what keywords your competitors are using.
2. Write Quality Long-Form Content (to an extent)
As long as all the content on your web page is insightful and relevant to the topic at hand, then it’s always best to aim for long-form content. It lends itself to depth and ensures a comprehensive overview of a topic.
However, having long-form content doesn't mean it's topically relevant, nor does it guarantee high rankings.
The key lies with your page's ability to fulfill the searcher’s query. Whether you achieve this in 5,000 words or 500 simply doesn't matter.
3. Build up Good Relationships With Topically Relevant Sites
Establishing relationships with websites that contain similar, high-quality content is a great way to collect quality backlinks that boost your topical relevance.
Tools to help you Achieve this
There are tools to help you with quality keyword research. This plays a vital role in identifying your audience and attracting them to your website.
AnswerThePublic is a keyword research tool that pulls queries from giant search engines like Google and Bing and presents them in a categorized keyword image. Once a topic, keyword, brand or product is put into the search bar, AnswerThePublic immediately gathers all the data about that keyword in a visualized form. This image contains questions people ask using your keyword.
This tool provides you with multiple forms of data based on: questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical and related keyword combinations.
This gives writers credible insights into the kind of questions people ask about certain topics, and how to answer those questions satisfactorily.
Long Tail Pro is a keyword research tool that helps users find high search volume, low competition keywords to target in search engine results pages (SERPs).
With this tool, you can enter up to five seed keywords and get back hundreds of different keyword variations and suggestions. You’ll also see useful metrics like search volume, rank value, advertiser bid and keyword competitiveness score to help you choose the best keywords to target.
Using Long Tail Pro, you can analyze your competitors’ domains to find new keywords in your niche. This tool will show you the Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Site Age, External Backlinks, and other information about your competitors’ websites to enable you create an SEO strategy that will help you outrank them.
SEMRush is a full-featured marketing toolkit that helps SEO professionals carry out important marketing processes like keyword research, content optimization, content audits, advertising research, backlink research and competitor analysis, among others.
This tool makes it easy for you to measure how visible your business and content are on the internet. With it, you can see your traffic and the keywords you rank for compared to your competitors. You can also see the keywords you can compete for across different channels.
SEMRush offers more than 20 billion keywords, which makes it the largest keyword database on the market today. With this database, you can conduct keyword searches to help you build your SEO and PPC campaigns.
Some other visibility tools in this suite are on-page SEO checker, CPC map, backlink audit tool, organic traffic insights, and domain comparisons, among many others. There is also an SEO Writing Assistant feature that can help you optimize your content based on your Top 10 competitors on Google.
KWFinder is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps businesses find keywords that have high search volumes and low SEO difficulty. users can use these valuable keywords to strengthen their meta descriptions.
This tool provides SERP analysis to show you which keywords you should target. It also shows you your competitors’ rankings and assesses your potential to outrank them. You can also get relevant information about search intent and why visitors searched for a particular phrase or term.
Depending on the keywords you use, KWFinder will show you how much organic traffic potential your website has. You can compare this data to your SEO and ranking goals and tweak your meta descriptions to improve the performance of your website.
5. GrowthBar
GrowthBar is a popular SEO tool that helps businesses find important insights and data points to drive better marketing results. It can be used for keyword research, rank tracking and backlink analysis, amongst other functions.
The tool also comes with a powerful Chrome extension that brings all the key features of the tool right to your browser. When you activate the extension, you’ll be able to see keyword variations and the ranking difficulty score for any search query you type into Google. You’ll also see domain metrics like organic traffic, domain authority and top backlinks for every search result right in your browser.
Here's another tool to help you create the right content and also optimise the content.
Surfer is a tool designed to help users optimize web content. It works by evaluating the content of a page against over 500 on-page signals.
This tool analyzes the first page of SERPs for a target keyword and gives you data on average word count, keyword density, partial match keywords, alt text, and hidden content, amongst other data.
There's a Content Editor which helps you outline and write SEO-optimized content. The Content Planner helps users generate a relevant content strategy. It prepares a plan adjusted to your niche, domain and target audience. This way, you’ll be able to get great content ideas.
What to Avoid
You should aim to keep everything legitimate, and don’t be tempted to dip into black hat SEO techniques. Below are some of the things you should avoid if you want to gain topical relevance for your website.
Don’t build unnatural backlinks. In short, don't buy links, overly optimise anchor text links, or create pages exclusively for backlinks
Don’t extend your content’s word count just for the sake of it. Focus on quality and value
Don’t over-optimise your content with keywords. This ruins the natural flow when reading your content and will see you penalised, voiding your SEO efforts.
How can we Help?
Do you need a hand; planning, researching and creating topically relevant content?
