As an industry, the importance of providing in-depth coverage on a topic is essential for brand relevance and ranking. With Google’s helpful content updates, there have been cases of companies experiencing reduced rankings and traffic because they employed a spray-and-pray approach. That is employing a content marketing approach that involves creating articles for high search volume topics for the sake of generating website visits. A traffic-first approach that does not cater to the user’s needs and fails to build a solid depth or authority in a particular niche topic. With E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), there is no room for a blanket content marketing approach. Companies have to build an authority in a given topic that is closely related to their brand, product or service. But the journey does not need to stop there, more concepts need to be developed to help us better understand the intent of searchers and analyse how the available content is catering to these needs. For this, I am proposing the concept of ‘Semantic Authority’, an evolution of topical authority. This concept will be introduced below. 

What is Semantic Authority 

Semantic authority is the degree to which a website demonstrates a contextual, cognitive, and causal understanding of a domain by aligning with user intent, interpreting meaning accurately, and structuring information relationally and dynamically. To put this simply, semantic authority involves a more contextual and cognitive understanding of a topic or concept and developing the required content to cater to the user’s needs. Websites that have fully broken down the semantic relations of a concept or seed term are more likely to create contents that go a step above topical coverage. These brands and websites can be viewed to attain an authority in the meaning or semantic space. 

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