Topical Map Misconceptions and Common Mistakes Explained with Germans Frolovs

James Dooley: Topical map misconceptions and common mistakes. Tell you what, I could talk about this all day long because I've made plenty of mistakes when I've done these. But today I'm joined with Germans Frolovs, and let's jump straight into it. What's the most common mistakes that you're seeing with people creating a topical map?

Germans Frolovs: The most common mistakes when it comes to topical map creation, I would say, is, uh, not properly defining the first five core components of the topical map. Let's say, uh, let's assume that in most cases source context could be properly defined. But then, uh, yeah, maybe people will go, "Yeah, uh, too broad, saying we help people do this and that and that." But actually, what do you do? Are you a software provider, or how do you... Like, at the core, what do you do? Shorter and make it more specific. Sometimes I see that maybe a product marketing person would have, you know, speak, promote from the benefit side and define that correctly. Uh, but then, uh, after that, of course, it's finding the central entity. The most common mistake there is that people are not, uh, basically finding the entity that is the broadest and the most, kind of, like, uh, popular and defined entity within that topic. Sometimes it's going to be, uh, some kind of entity plus the attribute pair already, not necessarily the broadest entity for that topic. And then, uh, the core section, typically people know how to define that. Essentially, those are the money pages. So that is typically quite, quite, uh, yeah, easy to, uh, do. Uh, another mistake in the outer section, kind of, like, place when, uh, you try to define that, is that because the central entity won't be defined properly, you actually don't know where to go and, uh, in what kind of, like, related entities you can expand upon. Uh, so all these, kind of, like, combined is that the biggest mistake is, uh, probably if you haven't defined the core components properly, everything else is going to fall apart after that because that's the biggest, let's say, first strategic decision for you to make. After that, uh, the next biggest mistake would be that, uh, uh, sometimes, uh, I see that we create content maps as part of real or, uh, instead of real topical maps. Uh, or encyclopaedia, kind of, like, dictionaries, uh, without representing the whole, let's say, knowledge domain in a way that is also connected to your business. And maybe the last one, uh, the most, uh, common mistake would be that, uh, there is a misconception or, kind of, like, guessing, uh, around when to open a page, where not to open a page. We talked about it earlier in the different episodes. But yeah, this is sometimes a very, very common mistake where people create or specify that, yeah, we need a page for this topic, but the query doesn't even exist. It's just because conceptually it should have been there. But, uh, from the search engine perspective, they don't see that as a query for which they created a search results, let's say, page index.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then with regards to misconceptions of a topical map, can you explain why a topical map isn't just a list of keywords that are clustered together?

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. So typically, maybe how I also, when I started doing SEO, it is just find the main term and then find all the variations of that term. Uh, it is a small part of how you could also maybe, uh, start creating a topical map once you have defined your core components. Uh, but that's essentially sometimes where it ends. Uh, we are not going and necessarily focusing on the most important entity plus the attribute pairs within our topical map. We just go with exact match, phrase match, export the list and cluster them. That's where the, uh, story ends. We don't go necessarily in traditional SEO into sometimes more related entities, as opposed to how we do, let's say, in real topical maps. Also, the misconception is that, uh, or, like, ordinary or traditional SEO, uh, might have been around imitating the SERPs or competitors a lot. But actually, in the whole semantic, let's say, way, uh, we aim to actually be the representative source of the whole cluster. So instead of just looking at what they did, yes, we can still look at it and take inspiration and cover that as a baseline, at least if it's relevant. Uh, but we want to go above that. We want to have the most, uh, let's say, structured and, and, and factually correct and accurate, uh, uh, information structured on our website. So just copying competitors is not enough. Uh, maybe also there is a misconception that just having more pages, more, yeah, topics, that's always better. But, uh, in semantic SEO, we heavily think about prioritising the, uh, lower cost of retrieval. And actually, by opening up a new page every time, you're decreasing your PageRank sitewide, or PageRank per page. So knowing when to open a page, when not to open a page, when to consolidate, that is something that it's very important to think about. Also, uh, maybe the clustered keyword list is just a sometimes one-time thing, we think, in this ordinary SEO or traditional SEO. But, uh, uh, when it comes to topical maps, they are treated as dynamic and always changing, uh, depending on maybe, uh, semantic distance changes and the core algorithm update comes. There might be some new topics that are coming up, or be topics that are connected to a different one in a, in a, in a, in a different way. So the distance between topics changes. According to that, you might need to merge pages, consolidate them or actually split into more pages if the topic is growing and there are more, uh, popularity around that topic. Uh, the source context, I think, is another big thing that we talked about recently, that topical maps really prioritise that, while just a clustered keyword list probably is going to be ignoring that. Uh, I think that is all what I had in mind.

James Dooley: And then what would you say the most damaging mistake is when people are making a topical map?

Germans Frolovs: Opening probably too many pages for queries that don't have a query at all.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then obviously, with regards to that, anyone who's listening to this, make sure you check out the link in the description where there's a site radius score, and we go into depth about how wide should you go, how many pages should be opening, should you be opening pages, should you not be opening pages. Um, there's also all the different... Like, the difference between a semantic content network and a topical map, which then can kind of cluster everything together. With regards to the misconception then, like, why is it important for people not just to go and export all keywords in Ahrefs or Semrush, use a clustering tool and think, "I've now got a topical map"? Obviously, we went to town. We went into detail about a high-level topical map and the difference between it. Can you just debunk the difference between a high-level topical map versus just grabbing keywords and thinking, "Okay, I've, I've, I've done what you've said and I've followed it and it's not worked"?

Germans Frolovs: Yeah. Uh, the biggest difference is that you're going to be missing a lot, uh, and probably also maybe covering something not that much relevant to your business context and should not be a page. Maybe it could be just a side topic mentioned as a section of a, let's say, bigger page. That would be the biggest difference because when creating real topical maps, we can really find a lot more and create a much better, uh, much organised and, and correct, uh, representation of a knowledge domain, uh, of all the data in our website.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then one, one last one. In the semantic SEO community, when we posted this question and did a survey, like, what are the most damaging mistakes that people make when creating a topical map? Two things popped up. And one of them was, um, cloning and copying your competitor's sitemap. And the other one was just, just solely chasing search volume. So impressions and clicks, and solely chasing those two things. Why are those mistakes bad to do? Because people say, "Oh, here's my competitor. Surely I want to at least copy what they have and then build upon that." Why is that? Why can that be damaging?

Germans Frolovs: I would say I would always still use competitor sitemaps and what they are covering, uh, and then use that data to then, of course, go through my thought process as well to see whether it is relevant and it's going to be as part of our topical map. It's always a part of, let's say, the full process of topical map creation. But solely relying on that, that is not enough. Uh, and then, uh, also chasing the volume. It's still, I would say, it is important if it can be done right, if it can provide you good historical data. If you're just chasing volume and that all that user interaction doesn't end up with the most important function, like action, related to the function that you provide on the website, that is going to be damaging. If you are a website about, I don't know, yeah, an image generator, then you're just having pages about famous GIFs and you get millions of traffic just because people want the GIFs and then they leave, but they don't end up using your tool. That is going to be quite a problem.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I think, for me, the main mistakes always seem to be when you're not giving the right inputs right from the start. So giving the right source context, giving the central entity. If you give as much information at the front end to the experts, they will create you a good semantic content network and a good topical map. Make certain anyone who's watching this checks out the episode about the source context and the importance of getting that source context correct and giving it to the people, the freelancers or the experts that's going to be creating your high-level topical map. Germans, it's been an absolute pleasure, and we hope you like this episode on the topical map misconceptions and common mistakes.