Topical Content Planning is New (not "News")

Next week I head to Dallas for @InLinks to talk ,about my new buzzphrase, "Topical Authority Planning". This is the idea that planning your content around keywords is old hat, and when I explain why, I think you will think so too. But first - some disambiguaion... "Topical Authority" is about being a clear authority on a subject. It is not about jumping on what is topical in the news. #keywordresearch #entity #SEO.

In my talk, one of the many examples I talk about is the word "Mustang". It's a word which (according to Google Trends) has been SLOWLY growing in popularity over the last 12 months. But "mustang" seems VERY popular in Oklahoma. Traditionally, SEOs and PPC specialists might take this as a great signal for writing Content or even AdCopy. But really - is this information valuable when you boil it down? And if it isn't, can we improve on this out-moded approach to content curation?

The answer to my first rhetorical question is an emphatic "No! Knowing that the word Mustang is increasingly popular and very important in Oklahoma is useless knowledge without context." Why? Because in Oklahoma, where wild mustangs roam the hills around the village (City?) of Coalgate, people care more about horses than cars. (How does America call a place with 2,000 people a city? Anyway - I digress... don't digress if you want to be an authority... but if you do, use brackets.)

Context and user intent are much more critical to your business than keyword volume. Unless you are a global player with a market dominance and a need to suck in everything and everyone around you to maintain that pedestal, you already have an "ideal customer". Your content planning should ONLY be based on what interests them. What THEY are searching for. And even then, you only want their attention for the instant they are interested in what you are selling. Google, for a while, called this the ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth.)

The more unique you can make your business proposition, the more you can shine. The more unique your business proposition, the more your content might, to an outsider, LOOK the same as your competitors, but to people that KNOW the industry, it will be very different.

The trick is knowing how to extend your current content footprint in a way that is in harmony with this idea and not against it. Most Keyword research simply will not cut it, because the underlying tools do not start with your existing content in mind. How can a tool make a confident suggestion on what to write about next without knowing fiorst what you wrote about before? That's why InLinks brought out this new approach and tools for keyword research. Nothing like it exists as far as we can see. I think Market Muse and Clearscope have some of the same core beliefs, so Kudos to them. I hope that what InLinks has built takes content planning to the next level.

To build a Topical Content Plan for your business, use the InLinks methodology:

1. Crawl the crucial content pages on your site and turn the underlying topics into a knowledge graph that is unique to your site or business.
2. Cluster those topics into meaningful groupings
3. Use Google suggest to expand on those ideas, not JUST the keywords volumes for those keywords.
4. Use a powerful NLP on the suggestions themselves to REMOVE the ones that are not relevant and order the ones that ARE relevant by context, not (just) volume.
5. Look at what is already covered in the existing knowledge graph for the site to further refine the priority, reducing the need to write about topics already well covered.

This process does not need InLinks, but it sure speeds up the process!

If you would like to know more about the tool, go here. If you want to see me talk next week in Dallas, go here. If you haven't even started to use InLinks, yet, then what the hell is stopping you? at LEAST try the free version! Or watch the new Inlinks Academy vidoes - from the 60-second summary to the hour-long masterclass.