An SEO topical map is the roadmap for your website’s content strategy. Its core function is to organize your website’s content in a clear hierarchy of topics and sub-topics. 

It helps you:

• Make it easier for users to navigate your website
• Signal to search engines that your content comprehensively covers a topic
• Become an authority in a given industry or niche

In this guide, you’ll learn how to make a topical map for SEO. Unlike most other processes you’ll find online, this process factors in a topic’s relevance to your brand, business potential, and traffic potential.

This means you won’t risk creating content for topics no one cares about or that won’t help grow your business.

1. Identify your site’s main topic 

After making a copy of the SEO topical mapping template, ask yourself these questions to identify your main topic.

• What’s your site’s core focus (as precisely as possible)?
• What do you want to be known for or considered an expert in?
• What specific themes tie all your content together?
• What parameters limit the scope of your products or services?

Then add your topic in the spreadsheet template:

2. Determine relevant supporting and sub-topics 

This step is about looking for relevant supporting and sub-topic ideas to cover different facets of your main topic. This is the basis of your topical map:

You can use a number of data sources to help gather ideas for your topics without leaving any unintentional gaps. These include:

• Ahrefs: The AI keyword suggestion feature is a great place to start brainstorming related keywords to your main topic.
• ChatGPT: You could build out a topic map with over 400 ideas using a couple of simple prompts in the SOP and in a very quick timeframe.
• Google Search: Check out features like autocomplete, related searches, people also ask, knowledge panel and more for ideas on related topics.
• Wikipedia: Check out the table of contents for an idea of supporting themes related to your main topic. You can also extract more specific sub-topic ideas from the article’s text.
• Competitors: Using Ahrefs, you can spy on each competitor’s content plan and see how much organic traffic they get from different topics.

As you collect ideas, list each one in the Topics List tab. Add supporting topics in the blue cells up the top. Then, underneath, add up to 20 sub-topics related to each one:

3. Assess each topic’s brand relevance and business value 

This step is what makes our topical mapping process different.

The biggest mistake most people make when building a topical map is gathering a massive list of ideas without verifying how helpful they will be to a business.

For this process to work, be selective. Don’t add anything and everything you find.

For example, there isn’t a single SEO website or business model where it makes sense to publish all of these types of pages:

• Locations: London SEO, Sydney SEO, New York SEO
• Services: Affordable SEO services, buy SEO services
• Courses: Free SEO courses, Google SEO courses
• Tools: Local SEO tools, free SEO tools, SEO tools for small businesses
• SEO Types: Parasite SEO, technical SEO, programmatic SEO

Even though they’re all about the topic of SEO, the intents are different and suit different business models better.

Not even an authoritative site in the SEO space, like Ahrefs, could reasonably target all of these — it just doesn’t make sense.

So, for each topic you add, consider its brand relevance…

… and also its business potential:

TL;DR be selective.

4. Verify the traffic potential of each sub-topic 

In addition to brand relevance and business potential, each topic must also have decent SEO traffic potential. If it doesn’t, you risk creating content no one cares about.

You can check each of your topic ideas in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Either search them one by one (for greater accuracy in your strategy):

Or check them in bulk for a more efficient process (ideal for agency teams):

Using the Clusters by Parent Topic feature, you can group any mega-list of keywords into sub-topics automatically:

In either scenario, you’ll need to add your keyword list into the Keyword Clusters tab of the spreadsheet:

You’ll also need to export the keyword metrics from Ahrefs and copy them into the Keyword List tab. This data is how the total volume and traffic potential are calculated.

5. Finalize the topics you will target 

To finalize your list of supporting and sub-topics that you will target in your content plan, look at:

• Brand relevance
• Business potential
• Total volume
• Traffic potential

Check the Overview and Content Plan tabs for each topic’s metrics. Remove or replace any that have a low score in at least two of the above metrics.

Here’s an example:

Although the supporting topic of Bulbs has high search volume and traffic potential, it is not relevant to the brand and has no business potential.

You’ll need to either remove or replace such topics before sharing your topical map with your client or boss.

6. Map existing pages and new URLs to each topic 

If you have an existing website, it’s a good practice to map each of your current pages to the topic map. This will help you see what topics you haven’t already covered, allowing you to plan new content more easily.

Add the URLs into the Mapped URL column and set Page Type to “Existing”:

For new pages, add your proposed slugs of potential parent and child pages and set the Page Type column to “New”:

7. Plan follow-up tasks in your project management tool 

You will have a lot of content-related tasks come out of this plan, including:

• Creating pillar pages for new supporting topics
• Creating resources and articles for new sub-topics
• Updating existing pages for more topical depth
• Consolidating or separating pages targeting multiple topics
• Internally linking between all posts in a topic hub

You can use the following metrics to help prioritize which topics and content pieces to work on first:

• Priority score: This metric factors brand relevance, business potential, and traffic potential.
• Priority band: This metric bands your content plan into five categories.

In your project management tool, plan out anything with a priority band of 5 first, then a band of 4 and so on.

Final thoughts

SEO topical maps are a critical strategic SEO task to help make your content more user and search-engine friendly. The process is fairly methodical and easy to implement, even if you’re a beginner.

If you set up your topics correctly, the formuals in the spreadsheet will help you present topic-level data to your boss or client. You can also get topic-level performance metrics for each competitor to help build a business case and get SEO buy-in from non-SEO decision-makers.

Got your own SEO or marketing SOPs you’d love to share? We’re building an SOP library—connect with me on LinkedIn and share your favorite ones!