Google ranks the site that’s about the thing searched for. A store with twenty good pages on what it sells has more topical authority in SEO than one with two hundred articles on everything its customers might read, because every one of its pages, links and visits points at the same subject.
Google measures focus
Google has never published a topical authority score. Its internal ranking documentation, which leaked, names two measures that come close: siteFocusScore, a number for “how much a site is focused on one topic”, and siteRadius, how far a site’s pages stray from what the site as a whole is about. A page far from your subject widens that radius. It costs focus and adds little reach.
Google’s public guidance points the same way. Its questions on helpful, people-first content ask whether your site has a primary purpose or focus, and count it as a warning sign when a site is “producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results.” Its quality raters look for the same thing from outside, a site known as a go-to source for its topic, which is the A in E-E-A-T.
Build it one question at a time
- Write down the subject: what you sell and who buys it. Every page on the site should serve someone buying that.
- List the questions buyers ask before they buy. Search Console’s queries show them, so do the “People also ask” boxes on your searches, and so do the emails and calls you get from customers.
- Give each question one page. Two pages answering the same question split its searches and its links, and Google picks between them. Merge them into the better one and redirect the other.
- Link every guide to the page that sells, in the words of that page’s search, and link the pages that sell from the pages that argue for them.
- Get mentioned where your subject is discussed: suppliers, trade press, associations. That’s white hat link building, and it comes easier once the site answers what those writers’ readers ask.
What it looks like on a store and on a service business
A shop selling espresso machines builds topical authority with the pages a buyer needs: a collection for each type of machine, a comparison of the two models buyers hesitate between, which grinder suits which machine, how to descale the models it sells. Articles on the history of coffee or the best cafés in Rome widen its radius and bring readers who will never buy a machine.
A roofer builds it with a page for each service people search for, repairs, replacements, flat roofs, and a page for each question homeowners ask before they call: what a new roof costs, whether insurance covers storm damage. Each answer links to the service it leads to.
Volume doesn’t build it
Hundreds of pages generated to catch every wording is the pattern Google’s scaled content abuse policy describes, and near-identical pages for each keyword variation compete with each other instead of adding up. Pages written because a topic was trending, far from what you sell, are candidates to merge or remove, and Google’s guidance lists writing about trends for their own sake as a warning sign as well.
It’s built on your own site
Which pages your subject needs, which ones compete and which links are missing is the work of Rerank’s organic SEO services, starting with the pages that sell. The trust it builds shows over months, for reasons set out in how long SEO takes to work.