Build topical authority with data, AI and internal links

From January to June, I increased sessions on this site by ~247% and went from $0 to $2.5k a month in earnings.

Here's the playbook of how I did it using programmatic SEO, AI, Google Search Console and good ol' blog content:

1. Programmatic SEO for topical authority

Most of my projects start with pSEO because I can launch a lot of pages very quickly, on related topics, to jumpstart the topical authority of the site.

I had a dictionary of terms for the niche to use for this particular site.

SHAMELESS PLUG:

If you want to learn how to use programmatic SEO for topical authority, I have a course that walks you through how to do it in WordPress or using code 👇

http://practicalprogrammatic.com

2. Leveraging AI

These pages were incredibly thin to start with (maybe 100 words max) and after a couple of months to get them indexed, I wanted to expand and make them better.

I wrote (a bit) about the process here:

The TLDR is that I took the existing definitions and asked ChatGPT to give me:

- History and meaning of the definition
- A list of 5 examples of the phrase in use
- Terms that are similar to it (for internal linking)

I prefer to use AI content this way by giving it a lot of context and data to work from.

IMO it returns much better results than simply giving it prompts and letting it try to figure it out.

3. Blog content

Now that I had my base site of ~2.5k pages live and indexed I wanted to piggyback that authority by creating topical blog posts.

With my expert writer from Upwork, I added 10-15 posts a month on topics closely related to the definitions.

I also added some non-topical articles with a lot of search volume just to see how they would perform. YOLO!

As always, I indexed these posts using IndexMeNow:

https://indexmenow.com/en/#ae243

4. GSC-fu

By April, the site was starting to hit around 800 visitors daily, earning RPMs of $40+ on Raptive.

I dived into GSC to see what terms I was ranking for, whether they could be new blog posts, or the page didn't contain those phrases and could be updated.

I also shared a video of how you can use regex in GSC to do this yourself. If you're on WordPress then Query Hunter by @fatjoedavies is a great option too.

5. New blog posts

There were lots of keywords that existing content ranked for that was outside the scope of the article that ranked.

I could have added a new section, but I got my writer to create posts solely to answer these queries and internal links from the ranking page.

6. Updating existing content

When a new blog post wasn't needed I added new sections to the existing content and updated H2 headings.

This increase in topical coverage boosted the rankings of the pages.

7. Internal linking tips

Nobody talks about this, but I assume we all have the same problem.

When you create topical clusters that all need to be linked back to each other, it's a pain in the arse!

You might miss out on internal links to content that hasn't been published yet.

To solve this, once a cluster is written and published and indexed, I hire a VA to go through all of the content and create a Google Sheet of internal link recommendations.

This CSV will contain the blog post to link from, the post to link to, and the text to link.

I have a script that will run through the entire sheet and update all posts with the internal links, but you can also do this manually if your site is in WordPress.

This makes sure that I don't miss any key internal links and everything is connected in a way that makes sense!

8. Next steps - topical dominance!

I'll admit, my content strategy is haphazard at best. I tend to "play it by ear" and don't often have a strategic topical map.

So I bought a topical map from @yoyaoh.

Once that is complete, I'll be looking to add 100k+ words of new content 🔥