In the last few years, an SEO tactic has emerged that has
revolutionized the way people do search engine optimization. That tactic is
topical authority. In a nutshell, topical authority is achieved when your
website covers a topic more completely than your competition. And when that
happens, expect meteoric traffic growth. Sounds simple enough, but when it
comes down to doing it, topical authority is a complicated topic that only the
top SEO professionals seem to fully understand. That is until now. In this
video, I’m gonna show you how the free AI tool, ChatGPT, has made topical
authority easy as (beep).
applied the strategy
Just look at this glorious traffic boner from a website I
applied the strategy to, recently. Now, in order to explain how this exploit
works, did I say exploit? I didn’t mean that, but it certainly feels that way. Anyways,
to explain how it works, let me quickly break down topical authority as a
concept. If you write a single article on a topic like protein powder, for
example, Google just doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Even if you got Arnold freaking
Schwarzenegger and The Rock to co-write it, and it happened to be the best damn
protein powder article on the planet, Google is like- – I don’t give up a
(beep) – But once you’ve proven yourself by writing more and more topical
articles like, does protein powder make you fat?
How much protein can you absorb in a day? Then Google’s
like, okay, this website is developing into a topical authority on protein, let’s
award it with some sweet, sweet traffic. Now, there’s many ranking factors that
determine your position on Google. We have topical authority as discussed, but
there’s also backlinks, content quality, technical SEO, and more. The weight
behind topical authority is so high that even if you lack in the other signals
like backlinks, you can find yourself competing with websites out of your
league, like this case study here that Koray posted. Zero link building done,
massive traffic gains.
Now, problem number one, you need to produce a metric ass
ton of content in order to achieve topical authority. For example, when I did
research on protein powder as a topic, I found over 200 unique articles that
need to be written. This can be costly. For example, 200 articles written at
$0.06/word and an average word length of 1,500 words is gonna cost you a cool
$18,000. If you had one writer that could produce an article per day, you’d be
done in six months. You can get it done in 40 days if you use five writers, but
managing that is about as fun as a migraine. That said, this is all no problem because
AI software like ChatGPT is letting you turn out content fast as hell. After
you finish here, check out my video case study on how I built an entire website
with AI generated content, link in the description.
ChatGPT is letting you
However, there’s a second problem with implementing topical
authority. What all are you supposed to write to cover a topic and achieve
topical authority status? If you’re trying to become a topical authority on
protein powder, how did I know that there’s 212 articles that need to be
written? This is called creating a topical map and it’s where 99% of people get
stuck with this process. Turns out ChatGPT is a freaking cheat code when it
comes to topical maps, too. And that’s what I’m gonna show you how to do
in this video. But real quick, head to the link in the
pinned comment to sign up for my free SEO training masterclass. You’ll learn
everything I’m doing today, in 2023, to get websites to the top of Google. Now,
back to the video. To generate a topical map manually involves a two-step
process. First, you source subtopics from as many places as possible, answer
the public, people also ask, the auto complete function, related searches, a
trust question report, the Google NLP API, and your competitor’s site maps.
You’re gonna end up with a giga list of thousands of
different keyword topics. Some of them belong on the same page such as, what’s
the best tasting protein powder and best flavored protein drink? But some
should be separate. You then use a clustering software to sort them into their
proper articles. This process works great, but it takes dozens of hours to
produce a topical map and it takes quite a few tool subscriptions. Here’s how
to do it with ChatGPT for free. First, if you haven’t already signed up, go to
chat.openai.com. You might just be the last person on the planet. I’m gonna use
the topic of gym exercises as our first ChatGPT topical map example. Let’s
start by agreeing that some topics are gonna mean more topically related to the
subject of gym exercises than other topics. If you write an article on
ChatGPT topical map
bench press, everyone can agree, Google included, that bench
press is a gym exercise. Once you write that article, it’s gonna help your
topical authority. But if you write an article on yoga, sure, some people may
consider yoga to be an exercise, but it’s not really a gym exercise. Now, by
this logic, some articles are more beneficial than others for the purpose of
building topical authority. Let’s agree on that. So it makes sense that you’d
want to target these articles first. Let’s ask ChatGPT, the free AI tool, to
tell us what the most super relevant subtopics are. Yo, ChatGPT, give me 30
semantically relevant, but unique
topics under the main category of gym exercises? And here
you have it, bench press, squats, deadlifts, all the way down to jumping
lunges. Ain’t no yoga in here. Now you can ask ChatGPT, give me 10 different
keyword variations of bench press that address a different search intent. How
to increase bench press, best bench press workout, bench press technique. Now,
if you repeat this with the 29 other exercises from before, you now have a
topical map of 300 highly relevant articles to the concept of gym exercises. And
the critical thing to remember, these are the articles that are most essential for
getting to topical
authority, and that’s because of their semantic relevance to
the main topic of gym exercises. Let’s do it again with protein powder as the
example. Give me 30 semantically relevant, but unique topics under the main
category of protein powder. And here we are, types of protein powder, benefits
of protein powder, how to choose a protein powder, and so forth. For some
reason, ChatGPT spit these out a bit wordy, plant-based protein powders and
their benefits. Yeah, that’s too much. Hey, ChatGPT, reduce each down to three
to five word length keywords. There we go. Now it’s simply plant-based protein
powders. Let’s ask you to break that category down. Give me 10 different
keyword variations of plant-based protein powders that address a different
search intent. And again, let’s make them more concise.
And here we are, nice and neat. But you know what, I have a
feeling that the plant-based protein powder category is bigger than 10 topics. Hey,
ChatGPT, give me 30 of these topics instead. If we have the 30 topics from the
first step, broken down into the 30 unique keywords each, that’s 900 topics. That’s
all it takes to expand using this method. 10, 20, 30, 100, these are all
arbitrary numbers. Just know that the bigger you make your map, the less
relevant each of its topics will be. Is this ChatGPT topical map process as
good as the manual way? To be honest, probably not. When you’re scraping topic
categories from places like the Google NLP API and digging into competitor’s
site maps, you’re gonna be able to dig.
AI content
out abstract topics, like protein powder pancake recipe. So
the manual method is gonna be more complete but with the ChatGPT topical map, you
make up for it with the speed, cost, and relevance. If we go back to the
protein powder topic dump, you’ll notice that the more semantically relevant
topics are at the top, while less relevant ones are at the bottom. When you’re
writing, if you work your way down from the top you’ll find that you achieve
topical authority faster than if you covered these topics at random. How will
you know when you hit topical authority? Well, because your traffic will be
pitching a tent like this, so it’s quite noticeable. So now you know what you
need to write, it’s time to get that content written. But why not continue to
use AI to keep the process both quick and high quality? At the top here, I’ve
left the link to a video case study where I walk you through exactly how I
build a profitable website using 100% AI content. Make sure to watch that now.
