Dominating Topical Authority With KoalaWriter: A Practical Example

In this post I am going to walk you through how you can leverage two powerful trends in SEO: Topical Authority and AI writing.

You will learn about topical authority and how to use KoalaWriter to create an entire content hub, including the hub page (also known as pillar content) and sub-pages.

By the end, we will have created an example content hub with dozens of pages written entirely by KoalaWriter.

What is Topical Authority?

Topical authority refers to a website’s expertise on a particular topic.

It is a crucial factor in determining a page’s ranking. To establish topical authority, a website must demonstrate a deep understanding of the topic through high-quality, informative content and a strong backlink profile.

By creating content that comprehensively covers a particular topic and using related long-tail keywords to cover sub-topics, you can increase your chances of ranking for that topic or keyword.

What are Content Hubs?

Content hubs are a way to think about keyword research and structure your site to help boost topical authority.

They are sort of like categories, but oftentimes a single category will consist of several content hubs.

For example, let’s say you have a site in the “digital nomads” niche. First, congratulations! You picked an excellent, growing niche. 😉

You might have several categories, such as Travel, Work, Community, Remote Jobs, etc.

These are large categories. Breaking them down and diving deep into individual content hubs is an important way to help you fully cover each topic.

Suppose you want to rank for the keyword “best cities for digital nomads.” This keyword lends itself perfectly as a hub page (also known as pillar content).

That is because it naturally follows that each city you talk about in your article could have its own page to dive deeper into this topic. These would be known as sub-pages.

For example, if you talk about Koh Phangan in your article, then it would naturally follow that you would have a specific article about “Koh Phangan for digital nomads” that your readers could reference for more information.

To create a proper content hub, you would create dozens of pages, one for each city, and link to the sub-pages from the hub page. You should also link to the hub page from the sub-pages where it is natural to do so.

A Practical Topical Authority Example: Best Cities for Digital Nomads

Now we will expand on the example above and show how to actually do this in practice.

Step 1: Identify the Content Hub

When doing keyword research, competitor analysis, or general niche research, you will inevitably come across clusters of related keywords or pages that fit within a content hub.

We will stick with our example of “best cities for digital nomads.” I will show how you can improve your chances of ranking for this keyword by creating a comprehensive content hub.

Step 2: Identify the Keywords

Now that we have the content hub topic “best cities for digital nomads,” we want to create a specific list of keywords that are related to this to build topical authority and interlinking opportunities.

In this example, you would want to create a list of cities for digital nomads so that you can create pages for each of them. You should start with the cities you will actually feature as the “best ones,” but you can also create pages for cities that do not make your list to further expand your topical authority.

Here is what the keyword list could look like:

I created this list by looking at online resources, but you can also use keyword research tools, Google Autocomplete, ask your audience for recommendations, and use your own personal experience to create the most helpful content possible.

Step 3: Create the Content Using KoalaWriter’s Bulk Mode

First, let me show you the content that KoalaWriter produced for these articles. We only did minor editing to the output, including formatting changes and adding images.

KoalaWriter’s powerful Bulk Mode feature allows you to queue an unlimited number of articles, and they will all be created in the background. There is no need to keep your browser open or your computer running.

Also, you can connect your WordPress site, and they will automatically be created as drafts in WordPress as they are finished!

To access the Bulk Mode, you can click this link or press the Bulk Mode button in the sidebar when on the KoalaWriter page. Please note: This feature is only available to Paid Users. If you aren’t a paying user, you can try out KoalaWriter for free (minus the Bulk Mode and GPT-4).

Once you are on the Bulk Mode page, you would simply copy and paste your keywords into the Target Keyword box. Make sure that each keyword is on a new line:

I also recommend enabling the AI-Powered mode under SEO Optimization:

And enabling “Use Real-Time Search Results” and “Cite Sources”:

These settings tell KoalaWriter to scrape the top SERPs for each keyword and extract the most relevant entities/keywords/subtopics to include in each article. We will also extract the SERPs for every article section to help create factual content and automatically link to other sites.

Using GPT-4 will often result in a higher quality article, but it is not strictly necessary for most niches and comes down to your own goals and preferences.

You should also set your Integration ID if you want to auto-create drafts in WordPress.

Once all of your settings are ready, just click the Bulk Create button, and within seconds, your articles will be queued:

At this point, the articles are already being created in the background! If you put in the Integration ID, they will be created as drafts in WordPress. Otherwise, you can access them on KoalaWriter directly as they are finished.

When publishing, make sure to insert images, add internal links, and include more content that will be helpful to your readers. For example, you could ask digital nomads living in these locations for their personal experiences about each location by finding their relevant communities on Facebook Groups. It should only take around 15 minutes per location, and you would get some unique data that would be great for EEAT!

In the future, we will automatically add images and internal links, but we don’t offer the ability to do that at this time.

Step 4: Create the Hub Page

You might want to do this before creating the sub-pages, but as long as you have planned out which topics you will cover on the hub page, the order doesn’t really matter.

Plus, when using KoalaWriter, you can create the hub page while the sub-pages are being created in the background! Talk about being productive 😍

First, I have a big tip for you when using KoalaWriter to create listicles such as “best cities for digital nomads.” If you enable Real-Time Data and set each item in the list as an H2, KoalaWriter will scrape the SERP for you for every listicle item individually and use that to help write factual content.

On the contrary, if you put the list of items as H3s, KoalaWriter will not be able to access as much relevant SERP data.

Here is an example outline I chose (for simplicity, I only added 3 cities. But for a real article, I would be looking at doing at least 15 based on the SERP):

I chose GPT-4 and enabled “Use Real-Time Search Results” and “Cite Sources.”

Here is the result: https://samples.koala.sh/best-cities-for-digital-nomads/

Before publishing, we added images, created internal links, added an H2 section titled “Best Cities for Digital Nomads” with a paragraph generated by KoalaChat to introduce the listicle, and changed each of the city sections to H3s.

This was done due to personal preference. Lots of sites use H2s for each listicle item. It is up to you!

Taking it a Step Further

Next, you should also explore other related content hubs.

For example, you could also target keywords such as these:

best cities for digital nomads usa
best cities for digital nomads in latin america
best cities for digital nomads in mexico
best cities for digital nomads in europe

To help come up with those keywords, I used the /kw KoalaChat command, which is powered by Google Autocomplete. You could also use tools like LowFruits or Ahrefs.

Each of those keywords can make up its own content hubs, and they provide some great opportunities for additional interlinking and topical authority.

You can also go deeper into the topical map and create articles around the individual locations, such as “things to do in koh phangan” or “is buenos aires safe” to establish even greater topical authority. This is where using keyword research tools can be critical because you can filter keywords by matching terms and volume.

In a later article, I will dive into my keyword research process, which involves using LowFruits and Ahrefs (optional).

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you found the information useful.

If you liked what you saw, then please try out KoalaWriter for free.

Also, if you want to learn more about topical authority, this blog post by Ahrefs is a great resource.

We used the awesome Instant Images plugin for images in the sample articles, which sources images from free stock photo sites like Unsplash.