Topical Authority

What Topical Authority means for your business

SEO writers use the phrase more widely, for any site that covers its subject in depth. You'll also hear it called semantic authority, or topic coherence, though researchers use topic coherence for something else: a 2010 paper by David Newman and colleagues uses it to rate how well a set of words picked out by software hangs together as one topic. Google's post is about news publishers and doesn't describe a score for other kinds of sites. Its general advice for site owners asks a close question, though: whether a page gives "a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic."

For a small business, the subject is your trade in the places you serve. Google lists "producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well" as a warning sign. We read that as a reason to go further into your own trade before you add new subjects.

Topical depth, also called content depth, is how far a site goes into each part of its subject. We don't measure it by length. A long page that repeats what every other site says adds little. We'd look for the questions customers ask that no page on your site answers yet, and for things only you can tell them, like what you've learned on real jobs.

If your site touches lots of subjects but never goes deep on the one you sell, building out the pages your trade needs is what our citation-ready content work does.

Sources: Newman, Lau, Grieser and Baldwin, Automatic Evaluation of Topic Coherence (NAACL, 2010); Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, checked October 29, 2026

Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms