How to Build Topical Authority & Get Qualified Leads in 2025

Not getting enough visibility on search engines? Not getting qualified leads from your content marketing efforts? There's a common reason behind these two problems: Your website lacks topical authority.

A lot has been written about topical authority. This concept isn't new at all! But most playbooks are very outdated.

In this post, we'll share how your company can get on the path to content-led growth by building topical authority in 2025, with modern strategies.

Let's dive in!

What Is Topical Authority?

Topical authority (or "topical relevance") refers to how well a website or content creator is recognized as an expert or knowledgeable source on a particular subject by both users and search engines.

Building topical authority requires creating comprehensive, relevant, and high-quality content that thoroughly addresses all facets of a topic.

Unlike traditional SEO approaches that often focus on singular keywords, building topical authority requires an in-depth, holistic strategy. By covering a limited set of topics extensively, your website can show search engines that it's a credible and dependable source, which in turn can improve search rankings and attract more organic traffic.

Let's take a closer look at the potential impact of building topical authority.

Why does topical relevance matter?

Maintaining topical relevance can help you:

• Boost your search engine visibility
• Become a staple in your users' learning path, even before they've purchased your product

Let's quickly explore why:

How search engines use topical authority to predict content quality

In an era where Generative AI can rapidly produce content on a massive scale, maintaining topical relevance is crucial to becoming visible on search engines.

Topical relevance assists search engines like Google in identifying dedicated creators who provide value through expertise and comprehensive coverage of specific subjects.

Unlike catch-all, low-quality websites that churn out automated content across disparate topics, dedicated creators focus on a well-defined set of related subtopics. This focus signals to search engines that these creators are not just publishing to attract clicks but are genuinely invested in delivering insightful and authoritative information.

By showcasing specialized knowledge and consistent quality across related topics, websites with strong topical relevance build trust not just with users, but also with search engines. This trust is crucial for search engines in their ongoing efforts to deliver high-quality, relevant, and reliable search results, setting dedicated creators apart from those primarily engaged in content farming.

Topical authority boosts brand perception

If your company produces a steady stream of informative and actionable content that helps your target audience overcome important challenges, you will:

• Boost your brand perception
• Create organic opportunities for advocacy

Becoming the go-to resource for your target audience to alleviate a pain point requires a library of in-depth content. Topical authority can be a guiding star to achieving this goal.

The Old Playbook for Building Topical Authority in SEO

As we mentioned in the intro, the playbook for establishing topical authority is broken. Mostly, due to the fact that it focuses too much on top-of-funnel (TOFU) keywords, instead of trying to match search intent for those users most qualified to buy.

With the rise of generative AI, it's very easy for companies to target TOFU search queries through derivative content. So, incumbents that aim to use SEO to build authority and rapport have to rethink their content creation efforts beyond vanity metrics.

Establishing topical authority is no longer about publishing tons of "What is [X]" and "How to [Y]" blog posts. Instead, you should go for the long tail. Create original, authoritative content about the relevant subtopics that few users are looking for, but that your ICP is losing sleep over.

In the next section, we'll share how we get that done at Postdigitalist.

Our New Playbook: A 360° Approach to Topical Authority

Topical authority is at the core of our SEO framework. We know that topical authority brings short-term wins and long-term brand capital.

To trace a path towards building topical authority, we need to understand:

• The company's users, their customers, and what sets them apart
• The product
• The transformation that the product promises, and the expertise that supports it
• What non-blog pieces we should produce to support our blogging efforts.

Our playbook combines:

• Product-led content - We focus on how the client's product helps their target audience solve real-world challenges. And we go out of our way to show how.
• Thought leadership - We work as an embedded team within our client's team, to capture new ideas that we can implement to build a system of ideas, terms, and frameworks that's our client's very own.
• Content hubs - Content hubs enable us to organize our ideas, see the big picture, and design our content strategy at scale.
• Programmatic SEO - Programmatic SEO is our ally for building actionable, short-form content that addresses specific audience needs.

Seems like a lot? Here's what it looks like in action:

Our Playbook in Action: Developing a Content Hubs Strategy for an Outbound Sales Tool

The brief

For this example, we'll work on building topical authority for an imaginary outbound sales tool.

This company:

• Targets USA-based sales professionals and business owners at SMEs.
• Focuses on speed of execution, scalable pricing, and accessibility as core differentials.
• Has produced some blog posts before, but never in an organized manner.

Step 0: Gather insights

At this step, we'll collect all the information we need to produce relevant topic cluster ideas. This will involve:

• Conducting a content audit to identify pre-existing quality content, site structure, and top user searches
• Enabling a client portal where the client's team can start gathering relevant documentation
• Conducting workshops with members of the sales, support & product teams

Once we've learned enough, we'll move forward to mapping the use cases our product addresses.

Step 1: Use case map

Once we know enough about our product, audience, and context, we produce a use case map. We move beyond "jobs-to-be-done", and explore user goals both at a general level and within a particular niche.

Additionally, within the niches, we should detect different customer profiles and needs. For example, if we heavily target real estate agents, we should differentiate between the need to engage sellers and the need to engage buyers. And if we target professional services, we should identify which types of businesses are most relevant to us.

As we educate our users to embrace our product, we'll create a suite of product-focused content. While all our material should prominently feature our product, we also need a distinct collection of content to engage users already seeking solutions like ours.

We conduct this process in a Figjam file. At this stage, it looks more or less like this:

Step 2: Topic map

Our topical authority strategy relies on building powerful topic clusters that we can scale without losing sight of our strategic priorities.

At this stage, we'll map out each cluster, any internal cluster we'd use to target relevant subtopics, and a couple of example content ideas.

Ideally, our content ideas should be reusable. For instance, our "sales outreach" cluster contains a sub-category dedicated to cold mailing. Within it, we can create a series of blog posts covering how different business types streamlined their cold mailing with our platform's help.

After we've mapped all our content clusters, we share them with our client's team, so we add enrich our strategy with their perspective. Frequently, this stage of collaboration generates ideas for new sub-clusters or content formats, making it an indispensable part of our process.

Step 3: Keyword research & briefs

Once our topical clusters are properly mapped, we finetune and plan individual content ideas to start populating them.

At this stage, our deliverables will include keyword research and content briefs.

Step 4: Production

Next, we'll move forward to production. In short, we'll write, edit, and publish the pieces.

Depending on our scope, this initial batch of content could take anywhere from 4 weeks to 2 months.

Step 5: Templates & outlines

Taking our learnings from this first content sprint, we'll produce reusable templates and outlines that will enable us to continue populating these content collections while ensuring scalability and content velocity.

Next Stop: Achieving Topical Authority, Minimizing Headaches

In this post, we explained why topical authority matters and how we help companies build it. Want to see our playbook in action? Book a free consulting call, no strings attached.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's a pillar page? Do you use pillar pages for building topical authority?

A pillar page is a comprehensive, standalone piece of content that covers a broad topic in-depth and serves as the cornerstone of a topic cluster. It acts as a central hub, providing links to more detailed articles on subtopics—sometimes known as cluster content—that branch off from the main topic.

Sometimes, we produce pillar posts. Especially, if we're operating in an under-tapped niche, where a pillar post still has a chance to rank. Otherwise, we structure our hubs' home as a content index or landing page, as they enable better content discoverability than long pillar posts.

Should you target one type of user intent per content cluster?

Generally, yes. Targeting one type of user intent per content cluster helps create focused and relevant content for your audience.

Will content clusters help me with my link building efforts?

Yes, content clusters can enhance your link-building efforts, but indirectly. Gaining topical authority by improving site structure and relevance, making it easier to gain backlinks.

Is topical authority affected by internal linking?

Yes, topical authority can be enhanced by internal linking as it helps establish content relevance and structure within a website.

If you produce a steady stream of well-researched, insightful content, you'll be more likely to attract high-quality backlinks naturally.

What is content depth?

Content depth refers to the thoroughness and detail provided in a piece of content, covering a topic comprehensively and providing valuable insights or information.

Is topical authority related to domain authority?

At this point, you may be wondering if topical authority is related to domain authority.

While topical authority and domain authority are distinct concepts, they do intersect in ways that can impact a website's overall performance.

Domain authority (referred to as "domain rating" by certain SEO tool providers); is a metric that reflects the overall strength and credibility of a website based on factors like backlink quality and quantity.

A site's domain authority will be heavily influenced by technical SEO aspects and backlink profile. However, as we discussed when covering internal linking and topical authority, your website's topical authority can enhance domain authority.

How can you measure topical authority?

Topical authority can be measured by evaluating the depth and breadth of content coverage on a specific subject, assessing backlinks and citations from reputable sources, analyzing user engagement metrics, and monitoring search engine rankings for relevant keywords. Unlike domain authority, there's no single, completely objective metric that measures topical authority.

‍