Why is topical relevance more important than keywords?

As marketers, we need to create content that is useful and responds to our audience’s needs. The challenge lies in creating content that is both useful to the readers and picked up by the search engines because it is relevant to what the users are searching for. A search engine crawler will determine the relevancy of your page based on different factors such as content, backlinks and keywords.

Create content around topics rather than keywords

Before starting the writing process, conduct a topic and keyword research, this will structure your overall content marketing strategy. By focusing on demand as well as what competition is saying, you will improve your results in SERPs. Search engines have now evolved to value more topical authority rather than just keywords this is why it is important to integrate topic research into your marketing program. Tools such as SEOScout, MarketMuse or topicseed help you find ideas for articles, subtopics and topic themes. You can then easily identify keywords topics, fill content gaps and discover new ideas for high-quality content.

Increase the links to your site

As part of your marketing strategy, a backlinking and public relations strategy can help gain inbound links from a diverse set of reputable and high-quality domains. For example, your content should include external links but preferably to sites that are reliable and authoritative. These sites will basically link to your content which consequently will improve your page’s authority and boost your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Differentiate yourself with informative content

If you are trying to rank for something that is not related to your topic on the site, you need to create supporting content by way of articles and blogs. For example, let’s say you are a women’s wear fashion store and are trying to diversify your content and incorporate informative content that adds value to your reader without just talking about your products. You can for instance start creating supporting content around topics such as “styling” and “tips on how to dress” for such and such occasions. These articles if linked to your main page will help build topical relevance and boost your SEO strategy because you can scale new topics and build a brand presence to drive incremental traffic to your site.

Use a topic clusters model

This “supporting content” acts as a series of subtopics to your main topic - your landing page. By creating additional content that is well linked to your main topic and landing page, users will easily navigate from one page to another to get more information about a topic. This way your website’s structure will follow a “topic > subtopic” hierarchy with the main topic linked to a series of topic clusters, all linked to each other as well.

Understand Search Intent

Listening, exchanging and being relevant are three key pillars to any content strategy. Before planning for any pieces of content, start with the searchers, think about what they are looking for and then create your content around that. The more your content matches your users’ search intent the more time they will likely spend on your website and interact with more content.

Sources:

SEOScout

MarketMuse

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