Creating Topical Maps

InLinks can now visually show your stakeholders exactly what topics are missing from your content and how important each topic is to create a full and rounded view of a subject. You can create topical maps around any phrase or topic. You can edit your findings and either present a public page or pull out the chart as a PNG image. You can also export the underlying data for further manipulation in CSV format.

Want to know more about topic maps?

How do you create a topical map?

It is easy to create a topic map around any keyword using InLinks. They are now made automatically when a web page is audited or a new content brief is generated using inLinks.

The map created helps you to easily see the topics your web page does and doesn’t discuss.

How do I add missing topics into my content?

For each category of topic, inlinks shows the topics that are already being picked up in your page of content and also shows a branch of “missing topics”.

In the image above, the content is already talking about things like “click analytics” and “backlinks” but is missing concepts like “Pagerank” and Google’s “Hummingbird” algorithm. The missing topics are also colour coded red, yellow and green to help surface the important missing topics in the content easily.

If you click on any of these topics, the Wikipedia and related topics screen is overlayed onto the topic map, allowing you to investigate the topic further and also to add the missing topic into your content ideas section of the content editor.

How can I modify a Topic Map?

You can modify the spokes of the topic map in a few different ways. The first is to simply remove topics from the “Topic Analysis” tab. Then you may need to refresh the page.

It can be a little confusing to find the correct topic at times, which I expect we will work on. This is because the Topic Analysis tab shows keywords found in the competitor text, rather than the underlying topic, but clicking on the word will again reveal the underlying Wikipedia topic.

Another way to vary the topic map you created is to modify the underlying pages used to build the knowledge graph we created to make the topic map. You can do this in the “SERP analysis” tab and in effect you modify the underlying data set that is used to generate the topic map.

Export Options for your Topic MAP

Export as PNG and Export to CSV are both offered, but you can also show a customer a read-only version of the entire content audit, by using the public URL. Here’s the public URL for the content audit used in this example.

The CSV file may need a little modifying on your part if you wish to manipulate the data, as the main topic column separates the categories by dots. If anyone would like to make or show a video on how to convert these into separate columns, please link to it in the comments.

We hope you like creating topic maps with InLinks.

More resources:

The Importance of Topical Maps for SEO (OnCrawl)