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.
Want a detailed step-by-step process you can share with your team?
Grab the full topical mapping template and SOP, which you can share with your team, below.
This critical SEO SOP is perfect for beginners and walks them through the process step by detailed step so you can save time on training.
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:
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- 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:
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Insights From 55.8M AI Overviews Across 590M Searches—A Study by Ahrefs
According to Google, AI Overviews (AIOs) had over 1.5 billion users a month in Q1 2025. That would be 18.3% of all the people on the planet or 26.6% of all internet users. That’s a massive reach. In traditional Ahrefs fashion, I wanted to do the largest data study ever done on AIOs to see…
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