Topical Authority & Google Core Updates: Case Study

A look at creating content strategy based around content clusters, it's impact on website growth and lead generation, and evidence that websites get re-evaluated on Google's core updates.

More on the idea of topical authority via Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR: Importance of Topical Authority: A Semantic SEO Case Study

Results & Summary

With a struggling service line, we needed to make a distinct and focused effort to increase our organic lead generation on a give website. This site had a history of struggling rankings, and had been largely neglected until this project for a variety of internal or business related reasons.

With the timeline and resources available, from Dec 15 2023 - June 31 2024 we published or refreshed 81 pieces of content across 5 distinct topics on this website. All this content was focused around building topical authority for the site to improve our total ranking keywords and ranking ability, with the ultimate goal of increasing organic lead generation.

Results Achieved

• +73% Organic Lead Generation
• +112% Increase in Clicks
• +175% increase in total ranking keywords
• +121% Page 1 (top 10) ranking keywords

Organic Traffic Trend Analysis

When looking at the trend analysis, there's a clear point at which the March 2024 core algorithm update rolled out (officially began rolling out March 5th). The increase in ranking keywords was so noticeable that I was seeing 20-40 new keywords daily showing in Semrush, and it had tipped me off to there being an algorithm update prior to it being officially announced late April.

To me this adds to the hypothesis that Google is re-evaluating things like topical authority and reassessing websites on core algorithm updates. Although we started to see some potential growth early Jan / Feb, it took off once the update was rolled out. Since that update our daily clicks have outpaced the 12 week rolling average and is indicating towards a strong uptrend.

Intro & Background

Late 2023 we had a service line that for a variety of reasons, wasn't performing as well as we'd like it to be. Previously this site wasn't a priority. Internally this wing of the business had other items that needed to be resolved before lead generation was even a consideration. On top of that within this company, we had other service lines at a higher priority for lead generation.

Of course once we needed leads, the pressure came for them near-immediately. As far as SEO for the site goes, it was relatively weak and we weren't driving the organic leads we needed - no where close.

As a result, I shifted all our writing resources to this segment of the business for a period of time in order to kickstart the website's growth. This specific period of focus ran from mid-December 2023 until roughly June 2024.

Defining The Problem and Goals

The issue was that this website didn't have the authority to rank very well (if at all) on our target keywords. Our services pages struggled to rank due to the higher relative competition in our industry. As a result, not only was it difficult to drive leads, but we didn't have the authority to increase our page rankings even if we optimized them perfectly.

In this project I set out to efficiently establish a foundation of authority for this website, while confirming for myself that Google would re-evaluate topical authority on it's core algorithm updates.

Methodology and Approach

For this project the foundation of my process was based around my Topic Cluster Creation Process. Ultimately this project was a stress test for that methodology. I'll be providing a summary here, but read through the repo for a full breakdown of how I build these content maps out.

Broadly speaking I follow the below steps:

1. Create Your List Of Keywords: Take a primary topic, let's say it's coffee. Use that as your seed keyword and cast a relatively wide net, gathering as may keywords as you want, digging into sub-topics of coffee as well (such as brewing methods, beans, roasting, etc.)
2. Scrape Results: For all of these keywords, scrape the 1st result from Google via their API or other potentially frowned upon methods.
3. Sort Results: Group this output by URL
4. Organize Results: Manually pull keywords into lists underneath a potential article or page. Sort all the keywords into these groupings.
5. Create Silos: Once you've got a list of articles, create a silo with whatever parameters you'd like.

I followed this process for several clusters of content, directly related to our primary service offerings with this wing of the business.

We tackled a single cluster at a time, fully completing and publishing each piece of content within the topic before moving onto the next one. Once published I ensured each cluster was internally linked, following a slightly modified version of High Voltage SEO's reverse content silos. The only difference is that depending on the size of the topic I may have a third, lower tier. 

Image via High Voltage SEO: Reverse Content Silos

Conclusion

As a result, this update allowed me to test my topic cluster creation process as well as test the idea that Google is re-evaluating sites on core algorithm updates.

While it still has room for improvement, it's shown me that my topic cluster creation process does a very solid job at mapping a cluster effectively and efficiently, with the process benefiting from algorithm updates and contributing to ongoing traffic growth and lead generation efforts.

To see more of my work and case studies, visit https://rkseo.xyz