You need to create content for your site to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Having lots of content to show your expertise or authority in your field is great. But to come up with quality expert content, you must have an efficient strategy. You must focus on topic-based SEO campaigns.

This guide talks about creating topic-based SEO campaigns and the top techniques to ensure ranking success.

What Is Topic-Based SEO?

Topic-based SEO means creating and grouping semantically related and interconnected pieces of content. You try to cover as many subtopics as possible that would benefit both audiences and search engines. 

For example, a site about high blood pressure could not only discuss meaning, measurement, and causes but also symptoms, treatments, foods to avoid, remedies, home treatments, and first aid.

This topic-based SEO, you 

  • Create content your users are looking for and, thus, is more likely to rank higher than those loosely focused on keywords. 
  • Improve brand recognition since your users associate your business with valuable, helpful, and quality content.
  • Help search engines understand user queries and the relationship between these queries and your topics.
  • Consistently produce interconnected topics that improves audiences and search engines understanding of your site. 

Remember that more content means a better experience for the user and a higher search engine ranking.

Topic-Based SEO and Topic Clustering

Topic clustering is part of topic-based SEO. Clustering helps create contextual support for all your pages under a specific topic and produces a strong internal linking framework so users and search engines can easily find your content.

Going back to our example, your site on high blood pressure could have three main topics: diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes. Each one will have a topic cluster, like “food to eat,” “food not to eat,” and “food alternatives” for the main topic “diet.” Meanwhile, “cardio training,” “aerobic exercises,” “weight training,” etc. make up the cluster for “exercise.”

How to Create Topic-Based Optimization Campaigns

As reported by Digital Authority Partners, intensive topic research creates better SEO campaigns. With thorough research, you can find topics more important to your audience to promote your brand as an industry authority and one of the tops in your niche.

Below are the steps for creating topic-based optimization campaigns.   

Your core topics are central to your brand, business, or organization. They make your audience gravitate toward your brand, which makes you unique.

A core topic is what your website is about and it branches out into various subtopics. Your website about high blood pressure can have hypertension as a core topic, with subtopics like diet, exercise, lifestyle changes, symptoms, treatments, and natural remedies. 

Define your core topics by: 

  • Noting your company or brand values. Write down what makes your brand unique and valuable. For our example, a site that offers natural high blood pressure treatments or hypertension support group could be values that make you different from other sites..
  • Considering customer issues or pain points. Patients with high blood pressure may seek a diet plan or natural remedies for hypertension. Learn about these from search engine recommendations or social media.
  • Following the latest issues or topics in your industry. For a site about high blood pressure, new drugs, new diet plans, and medical breakthroughs in hypertension treatments could be part of your core topics.

After formulating your core topics, find related concepts that further support them. Identify and use related topics to strengthen your authority in your subject or niche; users will see your site as the complete source of information about your topic.

For example, on your blood pressure site, publish case studies and research about your topic in addition to basic information like signs, symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, and drugs. When looking for related topics, 

  • Use SEO research tools. SEMrush has a topic cluster tool to understand your topic and look for cluster topics.
  • Perform buyer research. You can conduct surveys, interviews, and quizzes to help you understand your buyers better.
  • Check community sites. Forums and community sites have the latest in various industries, including yours. Sites like Reddit have more than 100,000 active communities worldwide and, thus, could be a great source of content information.                                                                                   
  • Review current content that fits your topic. You aim to create freshly updated content but review existing content that matches your topic before starting. Use Google and type in your keywords to find your content.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Discover Gaps in Your Content

After creating new content and checking old but valuable ones, improve your topic-based SEO by checking gaps in your content. Gaps could be any topic you covered loosely or thin content that needs beefing up. Review your content and look for gaps by: 

  • Using a content gap analysis tool like Ubersuggest. This free keyword research tool can help you analyze gaps in your content.
  • Analyzing customer journey. This helps you find missing content from the buying journey (awareness, consideration, and decision stage). Locate points in the journey where buyer expectations were not met and identify topics to fill in these gaps.
  • Check competitor websites for gaps. Use competitor sites as inspiration to improve your topic-based SEO. You can also use Ubersuggest to analyze these sites to find gaps and flaws to better your content. 

Start Optimizing Your Content

Now that your topics are ready, you may start optimizing your content for your audience and search engines. Make sure you internally link your topics to help your audience move from one related piece of content to another and improve their user experience (UX).

Also, optimizing your content helps improve search engine crawling and indexing. Google can readily understand your content and offer it whenever people search for your topics. Here are some great ways to optimize your content to promote topic-based SEO.

  • Use semantically related keywords. Your keywords remain essential in creating engaging content, but in topic-based SEO, using conceptually related keywords can improve your coverage. For instance, “high blood pressure” could be heart function, hypertension, heart monitoring, etc.
  • Create various forms of content. Use videos, infographics, charts, presentations, and podcasts to support your topic.
  • Monitor and adjust content accordingly. Examine content performance metrics such as site traffic, social shares, conversion, etc. You can constantly adjust your content, improve your topic coverage, and use other forms of content to improve engagement.

Summing Up

Topic-based SEO uses well-researched, high-quality content to optimize your website or blog. It creates content that makes the user experience better and makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index. Optimize your website using topic-based content today.

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