Topical Authority Graph

The Topical Authority Graph builds a validated content plan for your site. AI-generated seed keywords are expanded with real search volume and difficulty data, checked against your live sitemap and your competitors, then turned into an entity-based topic map, a content silo structure, and briefs that tell you exactly what to write and which pages to link to. You get the output as a multi-tab Google Sheet you can hand straight to a writer or use to plan a site rebuild.

I’m Simon McCullagh, and I built this tool after years of doing this work manually for client sites, across 12 years in agency, in-house and freelance SEO. You work with me directly on it — there’s no account manager and no outsourced team between you and the person building your strategy.

It’s aimed at businesses and agencies who need to plan content around topical authority rather than chase individual keywords one at a time.

What topical authority is and why it matters

Topical authority is the degree to which a site is seen — by search engines and by users — as a comprehensive, credible source on a given subject. It’s built by covering a topic in depth across multiple connected pages, rather than publishing isolated articles that each target one keyword.

This matters because modern search results increasingly reward sites that demonstrate breadth and depth on a subject through entity SEO: understanding how the people, places, products and concepts related to your topic connect to each other, and making those connections explicit in your site structure. As an illustration, imagine a site on ‘business insurance’: it shows breadth by covering adjacent entities like public liability, employer’s liability and professional indemnity as separate pages, but it shows depth by then linking each of those pages to the specific trades, claim thresholds and regulatory bodies relevant to them — a topic map identifies which of those entity connections are missing, rather than just listing more keywords. A single well-optimised page rarely outranks a site that has built a genuine topical map around the same subject.

Where this gets impractical to do by hand is scale. A proper topical authority strategy for even a mid-sized site can involve hundreds of keywords, dozens of subtopics, and a silo structure that needs to be planned before a single piece of content is written.

How the tool works

There’s no keyword list to supply. The pipeline starts from your site and topic and runs through these steps:

1. Seed keywords and enrichment — AI-generated seed keywords are expanded and enriched with real search volume and difficulty data.
2. AI relevance filtering — strips out keywords that don’t genuinely belong to your topic, so the graph isn’t diluted by noise.
3. Live-sitemap gap detection — checks your existing sitemap against the filtered keyword set to identify which subtopics you already cover and which are missing entirely.
4. Competitor ranked-keyword analysis — pulls in what’s already ranking for competitors on the same topic, to sense-check the scope of the map against what the SERPs are rewarding.
5. Entity-based topic clustering — groups the remaining keywords into clusters based on the entities and concepts they share, not just shared words, which is what separates this from basic keyword clustering.
6. Silo architecture — arranges the clusters into a content silo structure, with a proposed pillar page for each silo and supporting pages beneath it.
7. Live-SERP validation — checks current search results for the proposed pillar and supporting topics to confirm the structure reflects what’s actually ranking now, not a stale dataset.
8. Content briefs with internal-link maps — produces a brief for each page, including where it should sit in the internal linking structure and which other pages in the silo it should link to and from.
9. AI quality review — a dedicated review step checks the plan before it’s delivered.

This is one of a small suite of AI SEO tools I’ve built for this kind of work — you can see the others on the AI SEO tools page. It sits alongside my broader approach to AI search optimisation, where structuring content around entities rather than isolated keywords matters for how AI-driven search results select and cite sources.

What you get

The deliverable is a multi-tab Google Sheet, built from a snapshot of the keyword data, your sitemap and the live SERPs at the time the graph is run. It covers:

• Entity graph — the full map of entities and how they relate to your primary topic and to each other.
• Filtered keyword set — the cleaned list after AI relevance filtering, with real search volume and difficulty data.
• Gap analysis — what your current sitemap covers versus what the topical map suggests is missing.
• Competitor comparison — the ranked-keyword view of what competitors cover on the same topic.
• Silo structure — the proposed content silos, each with a pillar page and its supporting pages.
• Content briefs — one brief per recommended page, including target entities and suggested internal links.
• Internal-link map — a visual reference of how every proposed page should link to the rest of the silo.

The sheet itself is a one-off deliverable, not a live dashboard: the sitemap and SERP checks reflect your site and the search results on the day the graph is run, and don’t update automatically afterwards. You own the sheet outright once it’s delivered, and you can hand it to whoever writes or builds the pages. If your site or the SERPs move on significantly, a refreshed run can be scoped separately.

The briefs can also go straight into my Entity-Aware SEO Article Writer, which drafts each page and checks it against its brief before it reaches a human editor.

Who it’s for

This suits two types of client. The first is a business planning a content strategy from scratch, or restructuring an existing site that’s grown without a clear topic structure — the kind of site where content has been added page by page without a plan for how it should connect. The second is agencies who need a topical map and content silo produced quickly for a client, without building the process in-house.

It’s not a tool for someone who wants a handful of blog post ideas. It’s built for whole-site or whole-section planning, where the value comes from seeing the topic as a connected structure rather than a list of keywords.

FAQs

What is topical authority in SEO?

It’s the extent to which a site is treated as a comprehensive, trustworthy source on a subject, built by covering the topic’s related entities and subtopics in depth across connected pages, rather than through individual keyword-targeted articles alone.

How is a topical authority graph different from keyword clustering?

Keyword clustering groups keywords by shared words or search intent alone. A topical authority graph groups them by the underlying entities and concepts they relate to, then builds that into a silo structure with pillar pages and internal links — it’s a structural output, not just a grouped list.

What do I need to provide to use it?

Your site’s URL and the topic or market you want to cover. There’s no keyword export to supply: seed keywords are generated and enriched with real search data as part of the pipeline, and your live sitemap is checked automatically.

Get your topical map

If you’re planning a content strategy or restructuring a site around topical authority, I can run your site through the pipeline and send back the full sheet, either as a one-off project or as part of ongoing work.

Talk to me about your project, or request a free SEO website report.