Today, I will teach you how to rank for every keyword in your niche.

How?

By achieving Topical Authority using complete and accurate Topical Maps.

You achieve Topical Authority when you cover a topic so comprehensively (and well) that users don’t need to go anywhere else.

It is how a small DR 37 site that only talks about skiing can outrank larger sites for “best womens ski goggles”

It also allows you to ensure your site structure and internal linking strategy are correct.

Learning how to do this is essential because search engine algorithms favor sites that achieve Topical Authority.

When you achieve Topical Authority, you start ranking for EVERYTHING. See below:

Unfortunately…

People fail to build complete and accurate topical maps for several reasons:

– Lack of expertise
– Lack of budget
– Laziness

Don’t worry.

I will teach you how to EASILY generate complete and accurate topical maps.

Here’s how, step by step:

Uncover all topics related to your niche

The first thing you need to do is uncover all the possible topics related to your niche.

Use:

1. ChatGPT
2. Your Brain
3. Wikipedia
4. Google Trends
5. Google NLP API
6. People Also Ask
7. Competitor sites
8. Exploding Topics
9. AnswerThePublic
10. Google autocomplete
11. Google related searches
12. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

The goal is to gather as many keywords related to your niche as possible.

Note: MAKE SURE THEY ARE ACTUALLY RELATED

If you’re familiar with the topic, it should be easy.

But if you’re unfamiliar with it, you can use ChatGPT or Wikipedia to fill you in.

For example, you plan on building an affiliate site reviewing lawn irrigation systems. You can ask ChatGPT: “What concepts are relevant to lawn irrigation systems that an affiliate site should cover?”

This answer can inform you of the different subtopics and concepts you need to cover on your site.

This will also influence how you use the tools mentioned earlier to find keywords.

For example, one of the types of irrigation systems is “sprinkler systems”.

You can now use “sprinkler systems” as a seed keyword on Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer.

You can search for “sprinkler systems” on Google and scrape the People Also Ask questions.

Use your creativity to find all the relevant keywords. The goal is to find all of them, regardless of keyword difficulty.

Cluster keywords

Next, you want to cluster all these keywords appropriately.

You want to cluster keywords for 2 reasons:

1. To avoid keyword cannibalization (2 articles competing for the same keyword)
2. To find which keywords can be grouped together and answered with one article

To cluster keywords, we use Keyword Cupid.

Collect all the keywords and arrange them in a sheet.

Use the column titles: Keyword, Volume, Difficulty, CPC

Create a new project in Keyword Cupid and Select New Report.

Under “Select Data Provider”, choose “Custom” and select “All Metrics”.

You’ll have to input how many keywords you want to be clustered.

In the screenshot below, the number is 2,000.

You’ll end up with a report of the clustered keywords.

Below is an example of the Keyword Cupid report on the topic of diapers:

The report has grouped supporting keywords (column B) under main keywords (column A).

At this point, it would be important to go through column A and confirm a few things:

– Is it a relevant target keyword for your topic and site? (For example, niche sites will likely target “best” keywords rather than “product” keywords)

– Is it the target keyword for an article you need to write? (For example, if you were building a diaper niche site, you wouldn’t choose “diapers for sensitive skin” as the target keyword. you would choose “best diapers for sensitive skin” instead.)

After going through the whole report, you’ll have a bunch of target keywords for articles.

Build a Mind Map

Lastly, you want to visualize your topical map using a Mind Mapping software.

We use a combination of Figma and Google Sheets.

This visualization helps us plan site structure and internal linking.

This visualization exercise helps you know if you’ve completely written out a subtopic.

It also helps you understand the connections between different subtopics.

This topical map will act as your roadmap.

Now that you know how to build a topical map, you are one step closer to achieving Topical Authority.

…and ranking for every keyword in your niche.

But remember:

Topical Coverage ≠ Topical Authority

To achieve Topical Authority, you are also required to cover topics with a lot of detail.

Next week, I will teach you how to write useful, informative, and in-depth content.