How to Build an SEO Topical Map (With Template)

It helps you:

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.

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

Then add your topic in the spreadsheet template:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.

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

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.

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”:

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

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

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

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 formulas 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!