How to create a Topical Map

/ What a Topical Map is

A "Topical Map" is a visual, organised, hierarchical representation of topics and subtopics that lets you structure your content effectively, making sure every relevant aspect of the topics that fit your business goals and your audience's interests gets covered.

If you want to become a go-to name in your industry — something hugely important for search rankings these days — it's worth building a Topical Map, since it helps you identify the content needed to cover a topic in depth, strengthening your topical authority. It'll also help you set up efficient internal linking, helping your users find the content they're looking for.

Careful, though — this isn't about drawing up a list of topics you'd simply like to "rank for on Google," but about defining your content strategy with a focus on the topics where you can bring real value to users, based on experience and knowledge. Don't forget that Google wants to return relevant results grounded in knowledge and experience

/ Steps to create a Topical Map

Identify the main topic or topics

I could point you to plenty of tools for identifying topics you should cover on your website, but the best tool is your own brain. Defining the pillars, or "Pillar Hubs," of your map shouldn't be complicated. For example, if your project is a bike ecommerce store with a nutrition category on the site, one pillar could be "Cycling" and another "Sports nutrition."

The number of pillars or main topics will depend on the project you're working on and its area of specialisation. It's not about covering as many topics as possible, but about designing a strategy with the topics and subtopics that actually fit the project.

Browse the project's website and look at the main categories. You'll pull a lot of useful information for this first step from there.

In this example you can see the project is centred around cycling-related material (bikes, components, wheels, etc.), but there's also a nutrition and training category, and a workshop category that I think we could get a lot of mileage out of in this sample strategy. I'd also recommend checking their blog, if they have one, to pull out the main topics. So, at first glance, this would be the first level of my "Topical Map" for this project. I haven't even spent 5 minutes on it. If I spent more time, I'd probably find new main topics, but for this example, it'll do.

For us, for example, when building out the content strategy for the Link Affinity blog and defining a digital PR strategy, one of the topic pillars we're working on is "Topical Authority," which has specialisation subtopics like this one, "Creating a Topical Map," which is the article you're reading right now.

On top of that, I'll define other main topics like "Digital PR" and "Link building," with other related subtopics hanging off them. Like I said, you shouldn't need any tools to define these pillars, since the project itself will basically tell you what they are. That said, it's still a good idea to meet with your client to define these pillars, since sometimes their website doesn't reflect all the knowledge the company actually has.

Identify subtopics and ideas

Subtopics should hang off their related main topic. I like to work with up to 3 levels. So from one main topic I might pull 3 subtopics, for example, and from each subtopic, add ideas at a level below that. Sticking with the earlier example, the "Workshop" pillar could either have "Subtopics" like "How to fix a bike wheel," or add another level so that under the main topic "Workshop" hangs the subtopic "Maintenance," and another subtopic at the same level called "Repairs," with related ideas branching off each of them. Here's a visual of it.

To spot subtopics and ideas, you can use a few tools.

• Google Trends. This free Google tool shows you search trends for specific terms.
• Answer the Public. Generates suggestions for related terms. You can pull tons of ideas for posts about a topic.
• Ahrefs, Semrush. These tools have really useful features for finding keywords and related topics.
• OpenAI. Asking ChatGPT never hurts. Of course, I'd recommend reviewing it manually before locking in your strategy, but with a prompt asking it to give you subtopics related to a main pillar, you'll definitely get some good suggestions. I threw together a quick prompt as an example — you could put a lot more work into yours.

As you can see, you can structure your Topical Map to fit whatever your strategy needs. With that, your Topical Map is designed. Now you'll need to execute the strategy, and there are a few things worth keeping in mind that you might not have considered yet.

/ Internal linking

One of the essential pieces for your topical authority strategy to work is that, on top of covering certain topics in depth, they also need to be linked together properly.

A main pillar needs to link to all of its subtopics, and each of those subtopics needs to link back internally to its corresponding main pillar. You may have seen this diagram before, created by Hubspot.

If you look closely, this very article you're reading contains a link to its main pillar, the "Topical Authority" URL, and that page, in turn, links back here. As I mentioned, this makes things easier for both the user and the search engine.

/ Knowledge and experience

Given that our main goal is to become a go-to reference on a specific topic, we can't forget that all this content and internal linking won't have the same impact unless it's also backed by named experts in each topic. This is one of the factors that doesn't get enough credit in SEO, and given where search engines are headed, it could be key to setting yourself apart from the competition. So pay close attention here.

Before wrapping up your Topical Map design, it's important to do some research to find the experts who can back each piece of content. In my case, Sico de Andrés (me) is the topical authority expert vouching for the content in this article. If nobody at your client's company has the knowledge and experience to back a piece of content, you can look for collaborators to review the text, or even write it themselves. Personally, I really like finding experts to ask specific questions that support the content.

The mass publication of AI-generated content has pushed search engines to place more and more importance on who's behind a piece of content. E-E-A-T has been part of Google's Quality Rater Guidelines for a long time, but the updates of recent years have been heavily focused on this exact issue. So if you want to build authority, my advice is to stop thinking about Dofollow links with DR 80 and start thinking about creating good content, backed by professionals with real experience and knowledge in that field. Use your topical map to tie in-house experts and outside collaborators to each piece of content. That way, you won't just have a map of the topics to cover, but also who's going to back that content with their experience and knowledge.

Here you can see how, with our "Topical Content" feature, you can not only design your topical map but also assign experts to each piece of content.

Link Affinity also offers a feature for finding experts to support your content, whether through an interview, answering specific questions, or helping write the content itself. This feature is completely free, and you can submit as many requests as you like.