Tom says: “My additional insight for 2025 is to focus on authority score and understand it. This is actually a really hard thing to do.”

Okay, authority score. What is the authority score and where can people find it?

“Basically, at the moment, I went to brightonSEO and there are a lot of people talking about topical authority. Everybody thinks that it's a very important question: what exactly is the topical authority of a website?

A lot of people are talking about it, but it's really hard to measure what exactly your topical authority is and understand what the next article that you can write within your topical authority is to gain clicks straight away. This is a problem that I really see happening. Basically, it comes from what I saw in the last data leak from Google.

So, they have a metric called ‘site focus score’. Although I don't believe that they leaked too much in this data leak, this is something that felt really interesting to me. What I believe it focuses on is understanding exactly what the focus of your website is, to categorise it and put it into a specific pool to understand exactly what the topic authority of your website is.

This is something very interesting from the perspective of us SEO experts, and from Google's perspective because, in my opinion, what I see all over the place is that Google is letting us become a topical authority in a specific niche, in a small pool.

If you're HubSpot, you're an owner of many pools. If you're a small website, you probably just need to talk about the specific niche, in a very, very niche area, to be a topical authority in it. Whatever you publish within this topical authority, my hypothesis is that you will gain traffic straight away and slowly you can expand that over time. But the problem, as I said in the beginning, is understanding exactly what the topical authority is and how to measure it.”

Obviously, it's one thing deciding that you want to be a topical authority in a particular subject, but then you say that Google has already determined what your topical authority actually is.

So, how do you determine what Google perceives as being your topical authority?

“First, I would like to tell you that you nailed the problem because one thing is that we're saying that we want to be a topical authority in, let's say, content marketing, but what we're writing and how Google perceives that can be a little bit different.

And then there is a question: should we go with this topical authority that Google tells us, and is it aligned with what we want to do, or should we switch? Switching is actually a hard part.

But, going back to your actual question, it’s how to measure it. In my opinion, all this data is hidden in Google Search Console. Basically, we have all the keywords, all the clicks, all the pages, and, if we publish new articles, we see exactly what's happening in Google through Google Search Console data. But the problem is that it's actually hidden there. It's not visually saying, ‘This is your topical authority, you should go after this.’ It's hidden within the keywords and how they're clustered inside – and we don't see the clustering, to be honest, because we only see the keywords and the pages that rank there.

There's an easy way to do it and a hard way. The easy way to do it is to use your own hunch. Go into Google Search Console, filter out by the keywords that gain the most clicks, export it to a spreadsheet, then copy these keywords, go to any LLM, and ask it to cluster them out.

Then you will see exactly how they work in groups, and then try to figure out what your topical authority actually is. Because one of these groups will stand out and show you, ‘Look, you gain a lot more traffic here than with other topics.’ So, this is the easy way you can use an LLM to understand it.”

Did you favour any particular LLM for doing this?

“I don't think so. Like I think you can use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. I never use Gemini for that, but I think it would work out. I don't think it's a problem.”

Okay, so that's the easy way of doing it.

“Yeah. The hard way is actually to use embeddings. You do a big export to, let's say, BigQuery from your Google Search Console to actually understand more data and then add embeddings.

Embeddings are actually changing all the keywords into vectors and then understanding what the clustering is, with the help of AI and BigQuery/SQL, to understand exactly what the topical authority is – because it can be that you have multiple pools. As I mentioned in the beginning, there can be multiple niches where you have a topical authority. You're not close to just one, but maybe multiple.

And then the question is how they're combined, but you need to be a data analyst – true data analyst – to do that.”

Why would you want to do it the hard way? Is it more accurate?

“I think it's more accurate and you can see more. You can spot more things. But, to be honest, for most websites (at least the smallest ones), your hunch would be very, very accurate. But remember to actually narrow down your expertise/your topical authority to a small niche and then try to expand it.

Then see, if you're expanding it, are you still a topical authority? Dani Leitner was talking about it at brightonSEO and she has a travel blog. Basically, what she was focused on in her topical authority was only travelling with trains. This is the niche that she was a topical authority in, in the whole space of travel blogs.”

What happens if Google gets it wrong? What happens if Google is sending you the wrong type of traffic that doesn't do your business any good and you want to change your topical authority?

“First of all, you at least know it. You understand what the problem is because you will not sit in front of Google Search Console seeing your data and saying, ‘Okay, what the hell Google? I don't understand why you're promoting some kind of content and you're not promoting the things that I want.’

Then the question is what you should do. It's still a fresh topic. The question is, what kind of content should you produce and maybe what kind of content should you actually remove from your website?

I don't have an answer for that yet. I would love to do some tests, and I would like to understand more, but switching would definitely mean producing more content in the niche that you want to become a typical authority in. And then you can see, from the Google Search Console perspective, if it's working or not.”

Why does Google get it wrong? Does it get it wrong generally because a site's published irrelevant, non-topic-focused content? Or does it just need to improve its algorithms?

“I think it doesn't get it wrong. I think we are wrong. As people, we like to think that we're doing things right. I'm half a developer, half a marketer. I believe in data. In my opinion, in most cases that I saw, when Google got it wrong, we were publishing things that were basically not aligned with our niche.

The question is to look at our own content plan from this perspective. Actually, are we doing the things that we should do to become a topical authority in the niche or not? In most cases, in my opinion, we as humans were wrong.”

Is it possible to analyse the topical authority of competitors? Because the way that you're talking about analysing this is obviously using Google Search Console data, so you wouldn't have that data for competitors.

“I think it's possible using tools like Majestic. If you can pull the keywords from different competitors, you can do the same analytics based on estimations. It will not be as accurate because, in Google Search Console, you get really accurate data when it comes to how many clicks you got, but it will give you a hunch on where the topical authority of your competitors is.

Definitely, it's doable. You can do it the same way, but based on estimations that you get from tools that give you estimations based on keywords.”

Then is it worthwhile determining your content strategy based on the topical authorities of your competitors?

If you've already determined that you've got a few competitors being very successful in a particular niche topical authority, and you've identified another area that you think is underserved, is it worthwhile basing your content strategy on that?

“Possibly, but always think about it from the benefits of your perspective, right? So, if you feel that it's aligned with what you want to achieve, then yes. If you want to just copy the things that your competitor is doing because they're doing it, then think twice because you don't know what the goal of your competitor is.

What is their KPI? What is the strategy behind what they have? The question is if it's aligned with your goals. If yes, then do it. If not, avoid it.”

If SEOs like the sound of this and they're talking about topical authority internally with other marketing teams, how do you articulate the value of doing well in a topical authority?

Can you compare the financial value of publishing a post that is relevant to your topical authority versus one that isn't?

“I don't know. I don't have an opinion yet, to be honest, on this perspective. Definitely, if you have a topical authority in a specific niche, it's like having your own personal keyword difficulty. Even though the keyword difficulty of a keyword is like 80, maybe, within your topical authority, your keyword difficulty for the same keyword would be like 20.

If you understand exactly what your topical authority is, that means it will gradually lower the keyword difficulty of the keywords within your topical authority. This is still a fresh topic because it's connected with how we understand the language, and embeddings is one of the best ways to understand and turn everything into a mathematical equation because we can compare vectors together and see how they're aligned.

I would love to see, in 2025, how people are using embeddings to understand keyword difficulty and exploit it to the extent that they can.”

Talking about keywords, how do you determine the keywords that are likely to be most relevant to your topical authority that you haven't attempted to rank for yet?

“This is the whole question of searching for new keywords. We can use multiple techniques for searching for new keywords. For example, we can go to our competition and check what they rank for. And then, if we know exactly what our topical authority is based on the keywords from Google Search Console and based on embeddings, we can turn the same keywords that we just downloaded from your competition into embeddings and see what topics we have not covered yet but are within the niche that we want to cover.

It's kind of like a new, still very fresh, way of looking for keywords within specific niches. But, basically, you have to put analytical skills and data scientist skills into that, and that becomes available because of embeddings.”

What's your method for determining what type of content and volume of content to publish in relation to your target keyword phrase?

“Again, I think I don't have an answer. It's a difficult one. My opinion about owning topical authority is basically to create content to the extent that you will cover the most out of the topical authority, and then gradually grow your topical authority to different niches.

To simplify it, I think you, as a content writer or as a company, should be the Wikipedia of your niche to cover the topical authority inside out.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Definitely, if you're struggling with time, you should focus on the things that bring you the biggest conversion rates. To understand it, it's not just about adding more topics to your content calendar, but understanding which topics you should add to your content calendar that will give you the most value and the most conversions, because this is what SEO should focus on.

It's not about the traffic on its own, it's what's the lowest ROI that you can get on bringing you leads and conversions. But to do it, you have to understand what your topical authority is to better decisions faster, and not make mistakes in choosing the topics that you're going after. That you're going after.”

I think it's worthwhile just honing in on a particular word that you've used a couple of times, ‘embeddings’.

How would you summarise what embeddings are for SEOs that are struggling just to put a finger on what you're meaning by that?

“Sure thing. So, embeddings are turning anything into a vector. These LLMs are really good because they're large language models and what they can help you out with is turning any kind of text – for example, keywords, the whole article, maybe a paragraph, maybe headings – and turning it into vectors.

This way, if you have a vector of a couple of thousands of dimensions, it's really hard to understand from a human's perspective, but it's something that you can compare together because it's within a specific topic. This way, we can actually understand how things are working together.

For example, if we're talking about a Wikipedia page on New York, we know that New York is connected to ‘Statue of Liberty’, ‘Manhattan’, and a couple of other things. Probably, the whole concept of New York, if it's an article, will also have a similar embedding, like a vector that I can compare together. This way I can align all these topics together just to understand exactly how they may be close to each other.”

Do you have any preferred software or methodology you use to do that?

“It's LLMs. Basically, if you're using ChatGPT, they have a special model for embeddings. It's called GPT embeddings. Also, there is one in Gemini and, as far as I know, Claude also has it.

But, from the ‘chat’ perspective, it's impossible to do it. You can do it only through API. Because what would happen if you asked for embeddings in ChatGPT, it would give you a vector of 1,000 dimensions, and what would you do with that? I don't know. It's really hard. So, it has to actually be through an API to understand it.”

Tom Winter is Chief Growth Officer and Co-Founder at SEOwind, and you can find him over at SEOWind.io.