I tried to make topical authority concrete. I ended up building a SaaS.

I’d been thinking about the concept of topical authority for quite a while.

It has always felt like a fairly logical consequence of how search works.

Google has spent decades trying to understand what someone actually wants when they make a search, and which result can answer it best. Seen that way, it makes sense that a site’s relevance does not depend only on individual pages optimized for certain searches, but also on how it covers and connects a topic as a whole.

The idea made sense to me.

The difficult part was turning it into something I could actually use.

Because “build topical authority” sounds good as a principle. But as soon as you try to apply it to a real project, questions start appearing.

What exactly is the territory this business should cover?

What topics are part of it? Which ones are truly relevant to its audience and offering?

How should it be divided into topics and clusters?

What deserves its own page?

And where do you stop?

That last one seemed especially important to me. You can follow semantic relationships almost indefinitely. But just because two topics are related doesn’t mean it makes sense for a business to try to rank for both.

So I started trying to put some structure around all of this.

First I needed to define the territory and organize it into clusters.

Then those clusters had to turn into actual pages.

Those pages needed specific searches and intents to cover.

And if they were all part of the same structure, I also needed to understand how they should relate and link to each other.

Little by little, it started to look like a map.

But a map can be intellectually interesting and completely useless.

If you finish building it and still don’t know which page you should create on Monday morning, you haven’t solved much.

So the map had to become a plan: what was worth building first, and what could wait.

Every answer seemed to create the next question.

At some point, what had started as an attempt to make an abstract SEO idea operational had turned into a system:

project context → territory → clusters → pages → keywords → internal links → priorities

And that’s when I started thinking it made more sense to turn the system into software.

That became SEO Map.

You give it the context of a project — what the business does, who it’s for and the market it operates in — and it builds a strategy around it: the territory worth covering, how to organize it, which pages to create, which searches each page should cover, how those pages should link together, and what to build first.

I’ve just launched it. If you want to see where this whole rabbit hole ended up:

https://www.seomap.io

If you use SEO as an acquisition channel for your own product, I’m curious: how are you solving this part today?

And if you try SEO Map, I’d be especially interested in where the map it generates stops matching the way you understand your own business.