White Hat SEO "building" Topical authority a little guide.

[t2van]

So as 2025 is coming to a wrap. I thought id share how I been going about topical authority for some time, it's nothing crazy new I don't think, I also know people don't like to share some things when trying to build this out, but like most of my shares I've taken it as far as I can or moved it passed it so here you go.

Important:

Before moving further I should mention if your site is brand new or starting with a fresh domain id create the answers shown here as a individual pages. I've assumed everyone has a website and they are looking to get a little boost in ranking. So I've focused this on building out FAQs within content or you could create this as stand alone FAQ pages if your prepared to put the effort in. I've not done it as singular pages so it might be a little bit different in how you generate the content but that's a whole other thing.

Starting: Going for the quick win

Ok so there is no automation here, really, you need to sit and do the work.

Start by going into Google hitting up a search on your topic, product or whatever ever it is and you want the "People Also Ask" box

As you can see I've searched for "cold water fish tank" NOW the manual bit is to expand on topics ONLY that are relevant to the page you have created or want to include the FAQ. So if your page is about lighting for example only click the little down arrow on the lighting. You don't want to keep expanding this list with any old clicks as it fudges the results. Remember we want to boost the authority with questions relevant to the article you have.

So here we will assume our article is about setting up the fish tank for the first time.

See I've clicked and now TWO new Questions come up. Which are related to setting up the fish tank, I like th filter and the killer bit so ill click both of these and shut down the one expanded topic for ease of screen shooting.

See I've expanded the killer topic but it's gone off a little too specific with "What kills fish in a tank fast" that's maybe more suited for a specific page again or another Q&A section. This is a good example of why you need to do this manually and put some actual brains into the job and time and not automate these sets as you will end up watering down your authority and page by including content that does not need to be there.

So now you want to screenshot ALL of these questions as one big list (if you can)

This is my finished list

Note it's worth keeping going here till you find anymore questions you want to include on your page.

But THE longer you get the more you need to filter these out later. So just be prepared for that.. As we are setting up a fish tank we want to focus on:

• How to set up a cold-water fish tank for the first time
• Does cold water tank need a filer?
• How often should you clean a cold water fish tank?
• Are cold water fish hard to keep?

I think these will work well for my page.


So now we want to that that screenshot and go off to focus on some AI play

Playing with AI: Quick and dirty

Use a quick and dirty prompt (note I have had a few beers and alcohol as a whole since 3pm so I need to be a bit lazy here)

Id strongly advice if you have projects set up in what ever tool you like to use, is to use the one with your writing style, tone and website information included within.

Note I also just pulled the first water tank site I found to use as the example here, it's not mind, don't hurt them it's just for sharing in the purpose of this "guide"

im expanding my content to include FAQ section my website is (URL) can you help build authority with 120 word answers for these questions

This is probably the most shitty part of it as because we have a full screenshot of all topics it will write answers for them all. BUT that's OK if you have other pages such as the killing fish topic I touched on earlier you can get 2 x FAQ pages for 1 hit

Now we have something like this:

Simple right?

Creating the FAQ

Now it's just a case of copying THE RELEVANT questions and answers into your content. IT HAS TO BE RELEVANT. Don't just copy and page everything it says into any old page like some kind of twat. Take the time to do it once, and do it right. This goes back to the very beginning about expanding relevant questions tot he pages. Yes it's given content about killing fish you can skip the copy and paste on that section you just want what you need for your page only.

Now set up at the bottom of your content:

Frequently Asked Questions about Setting up a cold water fish tank

Place the QUESTION in a H2 and the answer below it.

That's it.

Personally if it was me id wrap this in a clean CSS list without bullets but you can make it an ordered or unordered list.


That's it. It's a bit manual and labour intensive 10-25min per search depending how detailed and how much effort you want to put in but it's worth it. Your now creating FAQs based on what People are asking and you can help improve and get some authority into your pages.

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Additional


Now at this point I would start the process of internally linking also:

If we take this answer

How do you set up a cold-water fish tank for the first time?​

Start by choosing an appropriately sized tank — bigger tanks are more stable and easier to maintain. Rinse the tank, gravel, and decorations using plain water only. Install a filter rated for the tank size, fill with tap water, and treat it with a dechlorinator to remove chlorine and chloramine. Allow the tank to run for several days before adding fish, ideally completing a fishless cycle to establish beneficial bacteria. This process helps convert toxic ammonia into safer compounds. Test water parameters regularly and add fish slowly. Never add fish on the same day as setup unless advised by an experienced aquatics professional.

Id link to filters, tap water pages and so on. Remember to link back to these pages as well.

If my site was new. Id create that as a singular page.

Use the above as the Title, opening paragraph and then have your favourite AI tool expand from there.


Why 120 words?

To be honest I found that number to give me a decent paragraph reply so it's short and sweet and for my pages and writing style I find it fit's in best for our FAQ sections. If it was a singular page you was producing I guess you could ask for more words... I've not tried that I do other things for my content creation.

 

[MisterF]

The Detailed SEO extension will scrape PAA too and download as a CSV

 

[t2van]

The Detailed SEO extension will scrape PAA too and download as a CSV

The PAA questions change based on what questions you expand tho? They didn't before.

 

[Champagne]

Appreciate the guide. Thank you.

 

[Aristocratic]

Nice one @t2van

 

[RogerM]

Great breakdown on the manual PAA curation. One thing that could really supercharge this is the implementation of FAQ Schema markup. Even though Google has reduced the visibility of FAQ snippets for many sites, do you find that having the structured data helps 'confirm' the topical relevance to the crawler, even if the rich result doesn't show up in the SERPs?

Lastly, that internal linking tip at the end is the real gold. To take it a step further, are you treats these FAQ sections as 'spokes' that always point back to a central 'Hub' or Pillar page?

I’d be curious to know if you’ve seen a bigger rankings boost by linking these FAQs to each other (horizontal linking) or by funneling all that relevance upward to a high-competition commercial page.

Cheers!

 

[t2van]

Great breakdown on the manual PAA curation. One thing that could really supercharge this is the implementation of FAQ Schema markup. Even though Google has reduced the visibility of FAQ snippets for many sites, do you find that having the structured data helps 'confirm' the topical relevance to the crawler, even if the rich result doesn't show up in the SERPs?

Yeah we include that schema I've found since post covid and experimenting with product pages that being "consistent" on the technical side does have some kind of SEO effect.

For example if you have 10 pages and they all rank in the top 10. If you make a change to half to include schema, or do a technical audit and clean those up. All 10 pages will slowly drop because I think (and I could be wrong) Google sees it as different sites, not sure that's the right word.

Thats been my experience. All of our current pages use schema so we include in everything (where relevant)

As for it confirming the topical relevance, it no doubt probably does improve. I've not gone that far with testing to confirm it either way really.

Lastly, that internal linking tip at the end is the real gold. To take it a step further, are you treats these FAQ sections as 'spokes' that always point back to a central 'Hub' or Pillar page?

Yeah exactly that, like spokes. We have been building a massive content hub for the past 2-3 years.

Everything on them pages when referring to a product is linked to it. Where relevant that article is linked back from the product page in a footer section called 'product advice or product resources'

Any part of the content that can link back to another page that expands on that same topic we do. So in the example above rather than watering down a bit of content that's targeting the cold water tank (with additional information) id rather create multiple pages that expands on using filters for cold water tanks, soil for cold water tanks, gravel for cold water tanks.

Then each of them soil, gravel, filters pages links back to the page for setting up the cold water tank. I cluster or nest ever topic back to it's self it seems to help build up my "authority" and googles "trust" in me that we know what we are talking about.

I've also found creating massive piller pages that covers every angle and part of that topic DO NOT WORK as well as breaking content down as I mentioned above. But that could be down to our writing style.

I’d be curious to know if you’ve seen a bigger rankings boost by linking these FAQs to each other (horizontal linking) or by funneling all that relevance upward to a high-competition commercial page.

Yes we have seen ranking boosts.

But more interestingly since the introduction of AI overviews in search I've been "winning" mentions and links to products when someone has been asking a question or FAQ type Q&A AI search results. I've often found and it's happening more frequently as AI Overview changes and improves that anything to do with "cold water tank set up" as a search we have a link to a product that's relevant to the users search or query.

Or from what I consider to be better again a brand mention so the future customer that is just maybe doing research is used to seeing our brand mentioned.

In regards to these pages boosting internal commercial pages or category pages within the SERPs for something like "water tank filter" to be perfectly honest they do move up, but the competition for some of those exact match terms can be hard to break through.

I have broken into the top 10 for some very high competition exact match category pages or commercial intent search results as the result of it, but it's taken time.

All product pages though and exact match searches in regards to that product regardless of the search query "product name" or "product name + feature or query" we rank and own nearly everything related to them terms as a result of content strategy we work off.

Ok I'm not selling a Canon EOS camera so it might take more effort for that type of thing but our products are still very competitive!


I hope that answers your questions Anything else just ask will do my best to answer.