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“Topical authority” is not a real thing the way you are thinking. Bear with me. It’s mostly made up by “influencers” trying to make you think they know something you don’t. I mean, it got you clicking on their videos, right?
You have relevancy. Relevancy means what is your website ABOUT. What is the topic? Are you writing about washing machines? Are you writing about dishwashers? That is relevancy. Your website is relevant for those terms. There are two ways to get relevancy. 1) text on your site. 2) backlinks with your keywords in the link.
Then you have authority. Authority means how TRUSTWORTHY is a site. All else being equal, higher authority ranks better. The reason some site outranks another site is 99% because it has more authority and the rest other things. You receive authority with backlinks. The better quality the site linking to you, the more authority you get from a link. This is the ONLY way to get authority. There is nothing you can do at all to YOUR SITE that will get you authority. Authority comes from backlinks alone.
So, you can think of topical authority as a mixture of these. Are you relevant? Then you will rank. Are you authoritative? Then you will rank better.
Grumpy SEO Guy episode 132 explains this concept quickly.
If you want a longer explanation let me know, there’s another episode that goes into more detail.
