Topical authority

Topical authority is the SEO industry's name for an observation: a site that covers one subject thoroughly tends to rank for more searches in that subject than a site that touches it once. It is a working idea. Google does not publish a metric by this name.

What Google has said

The closest official statement is about news. In May 2023 Google described a system called topic authority "that helps determine which expert sources are helpful to someone's newsy query in certain specialized topic areas, such as health, politics, or finance" (Google Search Central). The signals it names are how notable a source is for a topic or location, its "influence and original reporting", and its reputation.

That post is about news publishers and news results. It says nothing about a site-wide score for other kinds of site, so claims that Google measures your "topical authority" go further than the source.

Why depth still works

Three ordinary mechanisms explain most of the effect. A site with many pages on a subject matches more specific searches, including the long-tail keywords a single article would miss. Those pages link to each other with descriptive anchor text, which helps Google find them and understand each one. And a reader who finds a useful answer is more likely to cite the site, which earns links.

Google's advice to news publishers fits any site: "provide great coverage about the areas and topics they know well."

How to build it

Choose a subject your business has first-hand knowledge of. Write a pillar page for the broad question, then one article for each narrower question under it, and link them together as a topic cluster. Topic clusters and pillar pages walks through the process.

Topical authority in BeeRanked

Categories group related pages, each category has its own archive page, and pages in a category link to their siblings automatically. The internal links graph shows which parts of a subject are covered and which are thin.