Is Blog SEO Necessary for Topical Authority?

0:00A super common question that I receive is, is blog SEO necessary for developing topical authority? In fact, just yesterday I received this question. Shout out Jason. And Jason said, great videos, Edward. You've become my favorite SEO YouTuber. Thank you, Jason. Wouldn't writing top and middleofunnel blog articles, particularly for niches such as law firms, still be hugely important for establishing topical authority? You can only establish so much topical authority with bottom offunnel pages, particularly for law firms. What do you think? And the reason I'm even making this episode in the first place is because I'm very adamant about about not focusing on blog SEO, on doing search engine optimization with a

0:47blog and with top ofunnel articles. In response to Jason, if you're interested about doing SEO and law, I actually literally made a podcast episode about this episode 497 of this show called Everyone in SEO is Making This Mistake. And in that episode, I looked at personal injury law, one of the most competitive niches in search engine optimization. And I found it was wide open. It was crazy. It blew me away. So, I'd recommend starting there. But really, I I receive variations of this question a lot. People asking if Edward, if you are only recommending bottom offunnel SEO sales pages, how do you develop topical authority? So, here's my

1:26answer to this. This is what I've done. This is what I've seen work. You're not actually going to do SEO with your blog. You can, if there's an opening, if you see keywords that are wide open, but really what you do with your blog, put up one to two blog posts a month. One is probably good enough, but two to play it safe. and then actually write the blog post. Instead of targeting keywords, write the blog post for potential customers or for existing customers. So, you're going to be putting up things like case studies or thoughts on the

1:58industry where your industry is moving. You could put up company announcements. You've hit you've hit a new milestone or you're you're offering new things with your service with your services company or you have new features in your SAS things like that where you're answering frequently asked questions. Maybe you're meeting with a lot of people or a lot of your clients or customers are they're always asking you the same thing and you make an article. You put up a blog post answering that question. With all of this, if it's possible for you to target a keyword, if there is a keyword that is relevant to what you are writing, by all

2:30means, target that keyword, take that keyword, put it in your page t title, your URL slug, your H1, your top heading in the beginning of the first sentence of your page. Put it in those places. But targeting keywords with your blog post, that should not be the priority at all. The keyword targeting is optional. Only target a keyword if a if you have a keyword that is relevant to what you are going to write anyway. A good example is software. Put up pages about new features and make blog posts about them about these new features that you're putting up. We were announcing this new feature. if that new feature is a is a

3:06keyword that people are often looking for because people literally search for features on on Google for what they want or they ask chat GPT for features of what they're looking for. You can use a relevant keyword to write this blog post but again it's not necessary at all or you know you're put you're using blog post to show that you're active in your industry. Super simple. And something that I do actually is if you have a newsletter, take what you write on your newsletter and literally reuse it on your blog. And then if if there's a newsletter that is relevant to a popular keyword, alter what you're going to put

3:44on your blog to target that popular keyword. Just alter it a little bit. But the the idea is that you've you already have it written and you're just putting it on your blog anyway. So, what should you be developing topical authority with? If it's not if if you're not putting up long SEO blog posts, what should you actually develop topical authority with? How do you show that your company and your website is authoritative in your niche? I agree with Jason that you can only establish so much topical authority with bottom offunnel pages. That's true. There are other parts of this equation. However, you should be putting up bottom off

4:22ofunnel SEO landing pages targeting different transactional keywords. Not keywords like how, what, why, when, where. Those areformational keywords, keywords where there is purchase intent behind them or use intent behind them or somebody is searching with the intent to to call somebody to to actually do a discovery call, things like that. So, put up these bottom offunnel SEO sales pages targeting different transactional keywords. If you want examples of these pages, you can go to bitrix24.com/uses or slalternatives. These are hub pages of lots of these bottom offunnel SEO landing pages that that I'm talking about targeting different transactional keywords. And then these pages that helps you develop topical authority. But

5:09that's that's a single part of the equation. And if you want to go deeper on bottom offunnel SEO, I have a 13 and a half hour course on it at compactkeywords.com. I spent a year making this course. It shows exactly how to make these pages, how to find bottom offunnel transactional keywords. It gives templates for both of these things, how to structure your site so you can use these pages, how to put these pages up, how to make sure your site is indexed by Google and AI, and a lot more. It's basically a full SEO course that's overall focused on doing bottom offunnel SEO targeting these

5:43transactional keywords instead offormational keywords. Here's what else you should do aside from putting up these bottom ofunnel SEO landing pages. You should be doing to build topical authority to your site to make your site more authoritative in your niche. You should be doing the link building going to your root domain that you would be doing anyway. building back links to your home site that you would be doing anyway using language that is relevant to your niche and to what you do and to what you offer. I have a whole podcast about that. It's called how to build backlinks for a new website 2025 edition. That's episode 665 of this

6:21show. Lots of people really like that episode. The TLDDR is I I recommend in that episode using platforms like help a reporter out which is back source of sources featured.com quoted help a B2B writer I recommend building links with podcasts with directories and there's a few other strategies that I'm probably forgetting but that's over those are a lot of the strategies that I'm sharing on that episode of the show and I go a lot deeper into them on on that episode and then the last part of the equation with building topical authority because again you don't need to be doing blog SEO writing several thousandword

7:00articles to develop topical authority. The last part of the equation is doing outside marketing efforts that you should be doing anyway. On yesterday's episode I shared Unilo as an example and Unilo is crushing with their SEO. It is crazy the growth that they have achieved and especially actually after the recent March Google core algorithm update. They've got even a lot they got a lot more growth. But part of the reason that they're growing so well, aside from their targeting keywords better than they were before, is because of the overall growth of their marketing funnel, the all the channels that they have, focusing also on having a good

7:37product. But the brand is growing a lot. Their outside marketing efforts are growing a lot, and that's helping them. Google has gotten a lot better at detecting brand growth aside from only just using backlink data. I'm not saying backlinks aren't important, but there are so many signals that Google is using aside from just backlinks for discerning how popular a brand is. In fact, it was reported, I saw Barry Schwarz share this, that literally the SERs were showing how many followers on Facebook or Instagram a company had when you searched the company name. That was a new feature that Google was testing. And in terms of doing these outside

8:15marketing efforts, something that so Ran Fishkin, a legend in SEO, came on the podcast last week and we talked about that how being an overall good marketer is one of the best things that you can be doing for your SEO. Putting up Instagram reels or Tik Toks in your niche that actually helps your SEO. And put up a few of these videos a week that link back to your site, too. Not all of them have to, but just a few. So to wrap, is blog SEO necessary for developing topical authority? The answer is no, not at all. Put up one to two blog posts a month, not for SEO, just

8:50for potential customers and existing customers. Put up lots of bottom offunnel SEO landing pages targeting different transactional keywords. Do normal link building to your root domain that you would be doing anyway and enjoy developing other parts of your marketing funnel. And that is all for episode 681 of my daily digital marketing show. I hope this was helpful. 681 days in a row doing this podcast. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. Jason, thank you for the question. And I will talk to you all

9:24again tomorrow. B.