With Topical Map - get ready to breathe life into your Content by discovering new ideas and angles you may not have considered before!
What is Topical Map?
It's our newest addition to Keyword Research that's ingeniously designed to expand your Content Strategy and build topical authority by analyzing your competitors' ranking content. It generates article ideas for pillar and support pages with keywords you are not covering yet.
Topical Map provides you with semantically related terms. This means it doesn't just focus on explicit keyword matches but goes deeper to understand the context and relevance of the words in relation to your Content, allowing you to create a more robust and coherent content architecture.
Consider this your go-to tool for:
Have a clearer view of what your target audience is actually looking for.
Find new ideas to expand your Content Strategy and answer all searchers' intents.
Improving on linking Content for better architecture.
See how others navigate the Topical Map landscape and discover who you're up against in your niche.
Build topical authority
How does it work?
Topical Map is incorporated in Keyword Research as a toggle. It's enabled by default for English-speaking locations and can be turned on for other supported languages.
Turning off the toggle will give you access to the classic Topic Clusters.
It's available across the 3 types of analysis, and each one varies for gathering and sorting data. Here's the simplified logic to help you decide which option works best for you:
Keyword:
Crawls the top 20 domains ranking for the keyword entered, fetches all keywords these 20 domains rank for, and takes the top 100 based on overlap and semantic similarity.
Because of how Keyword analysis operates, it does not require GSC integration. This also means that the Status for the Keywords covered is not operational.
GSC domain:
We download all the pages from the selected domain and sort them by the number of impressions to pick the top 100. Then, we analyze the Content to choose the top keywords from each one of those pages. Requires to enable the Google Search Console Integration
To start a query, you want to ensure the GSC integration is enabled with the account that holds the desired domains. Next, head to Keyword Research, activate the Topical Map toggle, and Select GSC.
Pick the domain you want to work on from the dropdown list and select the location.
Competitors:
You are required to enter the 7 domains you are competing against to analyze which keywords they're ranking for. Next, we filter out these keywords by overlap and semantic similarity.
This is a great option if you already know which competitors you want to analyze and see what they're working on.
Please remember to pay close attention to typos when adding your domains. It could result in a failed query.
When starting a query in Competitors, you can separate each competitor by a coma.
Layout structure and figures overview
If it's your first time using Topical Map, you may have many questions about indicators, all the new information, and the level of insight it provides. We have prepared a quick overview to help you navigate our tool better.
Topics
Topical Map organizes all the data for better linking and architecture. So, as a starting point, you have a group of Topics generated based on the keyword(s). The order of Topics is set as follows:
First on the list is the closest in SERP similarity in relation to the keyword theme of the domain.
Then, the second place is for the topic closest to the first, and so it goes on like a chain.
0/27: Number of articles completed / Total number of article ideas available in that specific topic.
37.7: Average keyword difficulty. It's the average difficulty of all the articles on that topic. They are expressed on a scale from 0 to 100.
84.7k: Search volume for all the keywords in that group.
Delete and Restore a Topic: You can delete a topic by clicking on the three-dotted menu and selecting 'Archive Topic'.
To Restore, scroll to the bottom of the Topic list and locate Archived. Next, you want to click the three-dotted menu and hit "Restore Topic."
Article ideas and Show titles
Article ideas are suggestions on what to write about, including keywords you are not covering yet. However, remember these are only suggestions; you're not required to complete them all. The best approach is to evaluate the suggested ideas by topical coverage and authority score.
Show titles: You can enable this toggle to get title ideas. Titles are selected from one of the high-ranking pages that best fit the keyword with the highest search volume.
Titles are merely ideas and are not carried over to Content Editors created within Topical Map. Instead, we pick the primary keyword from that particular cluster as the title.
Pillar and Support pages
Suggest an article idea that covers the overall central topic with the highest search volume and potential to rank. However, you can change your pillar page if, for some reason, you consider one of the Supporting Pages a better fit. For that, locate the page and click on the three-dotted menu to select "Set as pillar page."
Supporting Page: Suggest article ideas related to the Pillar page with subtopics to help it rank.
You can remove and restore Pillar and Support pages following the same delete recovery method described in Topics.
Inside Article ideas
When working on any of the article ideas, whether it's Pillar or Supporting pages, you can choose up to 10 keywords. Feel free to pick the ones that best work for you, content checking and unchecking the boxes considering Search Volume, Avg KD. Keep in mind that the main keyword is not optional.
Since keyword suggestions are based on your GSC data ( for GSC analysis), You can clearly see which terms are covered as we crawl the Content on your pages to search for the keywords in that cluster. It's a great opportunity to cover keywords you still need to rank for!
Notice that the Status shows which page includes the term in case it is covered. You want to complete at least 30% of the cluster for the article to be marked as completed. (Requires to enable GSC integration)
Make sure to review your keyword selection, as once you Create the Content Editor, you won't be able to make changes.
Tip: You can consult the competitor's article ranking for the keywords in the cluster by clicking the icons right next to Avg. Difficulty.
Creating a Content Editor from Topical Maps
You can create traditional Content Editors from Topical Map which costs 1 CE credit.
To do this, click on the 'Write for 1 CE credit' icon option as shown below:
💡 You also have the option of creating Content Editors in bulk as shown below! Once you've selected your article ideas, click on 'Create CE Articles' and Vouila!
Creating an AI article from Topical Maps
You can now directly and easily create AI articles from our Topical map! All you need to do is to click on the 'Write for 1 AI credit' option. You can do this on the article idea section, or inside the selected pillar/supporting page as shown below:
Should you change your mind and wish to cancel the generation of the AI article, we offer a 5 seconds window to do so.
💡 Similar to content editors, you can also create AI articles in bulk. Once you've selected your article ideas, click on 'Create AI articles' option and our AI will do the rest!
Want learn more on how to use Surfer AI? Here is an article just for you!
Most common errors
We understand general errors could mean many things. That's why we have introduced more detailed errors for failed queries, which, in most cases, the messages are pretty self-explanatory. We have quite a list as our team has worked on being as much specific as possible so in this article we'll only mention the most common ones.
Analysis Type | Error message | Possible cause |
Competitors | We're unable to retrieve data for the competitors' domains you provided. This might be due to errors in the domain names, insufficient traffic, or no shared keywords. Please verify the domains or try adding different competitors. |
|
GSC | Your website seems to be quite new or doesn't have enough content for a detailed analysis. Try using a single keyword for your query or add more content to your site. | Most probably, the website is too small and ranks for few keywords. Also, it could possibly rank for some rare keywords we don't have in our database. |
Keyword GSC | We couldn't find enough relevant information for your keyword. This sometimes happens with very unique terms. Try using a more common keyword. | Provided keyword is weak and either very few other domains rank for it or belongs to a niche. |
If you have questions about other messages or possible courses of action to take, please contact our Support team.
FAQ
Do I necessarily need GSC to use Topical Map?
It's best to enable it to get full functionality with GSC analysis, but you can also use Keyword with Topical Map without GSC.
Do I have to complete all the articles suggested?
No, you want to pick what you think is best for your Content, considering factors such as Search Volume, Average keyword difficulty, and competitor's score.
How can I see the title ideas for the articles?
You can hide and show title ideas by activating the "Show titles" toggle in the filter section next to competitors.
Why did I not get results for my domain?
Since we have introduced more detailed error messages, the answers are clearer as to the reason. Most times, it could be related to using niche keywords, which limits our reach in finding relevant information. Please keep in mind detailed errors are only visible inside Keyword Research and not on Home view.
What locations and languages are supported?
United States, Poland, Austria, Canada - EN, United Kingdom, Venezuela, Australia, Uruguay, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, France, Czechia, Hungary, New Zealand, Switzerland - DE, Mexico, Finland, Brazil, Singapore, Spain, Italy, India - EN, Sweden.
Why is the title for the article different from Content Editor vs the one shown in the suggested article?
Article titles are just suggestions that you can later edit. So, when creating a new article, you should expect the primary keyword from the cluster to be the title.
I'm not seeing my domain, but GSC is enabled.
Make sure you are connected to the account that has the verified domain. You can also consult your Google Search Console to double-check if the domain is registered.