New Hyperlocal Experiment: Topic Pages
by Matt McGee on Apr 13, 2010 in Blogging, Content, MY BEST POSTS
You may have heard of the phrase “topic pages” already — it’s a fairly popular idea these days in journalism circles. The idea behind a topic page is that, rather than have multiple articles or posts about the same thing all competing with one another for attention, you collate them on a single “topic page.” For examples, see how the New York Times has created dozens of topic pages.
The goal is that the topic page becomes the authoritative resource for information about the topic. And generally, by “authoritative,” we mean it’s the page that earns and holds most of your search rankings about that topic, and the page that you can always refer people to when they need information. They’re kinda like Category pages, but not quite. I’ll explain the problem I hope a topic page will solve for one of our blogs, and show how we’ve setup our first topic page below.
What Problem Does a Topic Page Solve?
Primarily, it solves the problem that — for some topics — your hyperlocal blog might have lots of great information spread across multiple articles. Secondarily, some of those articles may be old or outdated and it becomes a challenge to keep them updated for new searchers who land on them via Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
My Specific Problem
In West Richland, there’s an annual event called Hogs & Dogs that attracts more people to the city than we have residents. It’s that big. We’ve been covering it since our blog launched in 2008, and we now have more than a dozen posts about Hogs & Dogs — some from 2008, some from 2009, and some from this year.
People come to this event from all over the Pacific Northwest, and they find our blog after searching online for information. But sometimes they hit a 2008 post, sometimes a 2009 post, and rarely a current post because the new content doesn’t always rank as well as the older stuff. So, we’re forced to go back and try to update all the old posts with links to the new content, like this:
That doesn’t really scale. You can’t keep going back and updating all the old posts (the ones that get search traffic) with links to all the new posts. So, our hopeful solution is the topic page.
Creating a Topic Page
Here’s how we’re doing this:
1.) Not a post, but a page. Rather than create a new blog post, we’ve created a WordPress Page. You can see it here: Hogs & Dogs. It’s somewhat bare right now, but we’ll add more content about the event as we get it. The theme we’re using (Canvas by Woo Themes – aff) allows us to create pages without having them show up in the page navigation, which is nice.
2.) Permanent URL. Although the content will be updated each year, Hogs & Dogs information will always be available at the same URL: http://westrichlandrealestateblog.com/hogs-dogs/.
3.) SEO & human-optimized content. We’ve created this page primarily for human visitors, but with the understanding that most of them will find it via search engines. The keyword is in the URL. I’ve optimized the page title. And we mention “west richland” and “hogs and dogs” several times in the page content.
4.) Evergreen, easy-to-update content. The page title says “2010″ but I can update that easily when the 2011 event rolls around. The page also lists date and time info, plus this year’s big raffle prize. All of that is evergreen content that I can easily trade out next year.
5.) Link to it often. No doubt we’ll be writing new blog posts as the event gets closer, but each new post will also link to this topic page and position it as the ultimate resource about the event.
Final Thoughts
The Hogs & Dogs event doesn’t happen until June, and even though people are already searching for information now — search traffic won’t really spike until the week before the event. We basically have about two months to get this page ranking for the terms that people use on the main search engines. I’ll let you know how it goes after the event has come and gone. If it works, we’ll be doing more of these on all our hyperlocal blogs.
Your turn: Are you using topic pages on your blog/site? Are they working? If you’re not, is it something you’d consider creating? Comments are open, as always.
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UPDATE, APRIL 26: For an update on this, please see Update: Topic Page Experiment.
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16 Responses to “New Hyperlocal Experiment: Topic Pages”
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Great idea. I’m about to do the same with a festival we have every summer in Mountlake Terrace.
Good luck with it, Dustin. Let us know how it goes.
It’s a good idea, what are your plans for indexing the “topic page” once the event is done and you need to change the “page” with the next years info?
Are you archiving past events? Photos, Videos, etc.? How do you envision that unfolding?
Looks like a great way to handle that Matt! Appreciate your expertise!
Great stuff Matt. We have a fair amount of experience with topic pages, and we’ve found that having dynamic content really helps getting your pages ranked high on Google.
How do you plan on keeping the page updated – manually? Have you considered pulling in a feed of content about the topic and displaying excerpts?
Also, if you plan on building more of these pages, having a curated “intro paragraph” or summary (i.e. why is this page important to your reader) is a great help to your readers, but also appreciated by the search engines.
Good luck!
Shafqat
(Full disclosure: I run a startup that helps with topic pages).
Matt, this is a great idea and one that I think not just hyperlocal/local blogs should be doing. Every news organisation should be doing this on their websites.
The thing I find frustrating with a lot of websites is that they have the mentality of print – do it, write it and then dump it. The web is a huge resource and indexing/archiving information is really important.
The articles should link to the topic page and the topic page should link to the articles. Simple.
I’m definitely going to try this out for my local blog but also push to make it happen in the news organisation that I work for. We need it!
It will be really useful with long running, complex and usually controversial issues (e.g. local development plans, big annual events e.g. festivals) and much more.
@Ed – absolutely correct. By intelligently linking from and to the topic pages, you can create a lot of engagement for your readers. We’ve found that putting the “Related Topics” on an article page mean a lot of readers click on one of the related topics to explore further rather than just bounce.
Again, for the long running/complex issue, its even more important to have a summary at the top of the topic page. A list of 50 articles will overwhelm a reader who arrives at a topic page to get more context.
Good luck with your topic pages on your blog and at work!
@Shafqat Thanks – will keep you updated.
I agree about the summary. It’s important to do that. If you’ve got a lot of content you can split it as well, maybe by year, maybe by content type. Whatever the easiest way to mix it up is.
I think it would be really handy that everything you mention ‘Topic X’ in an article you’re linking to the ‘Topic X’ page.
You touch on reader engagement as well – that’s very important. People will stay on your site longer if they see there are more articles about that topic to read, give people the chance to immerse themselves and they will!
If you’re looking for some amazing examples of topic pages, have a look through an experiment that Google ran with a number of the top newspapers called Living Stories.
These go far beyond a simple hand curated page, ala wikipedia style, but it does give you an idea of what is possible with this concept and I personally think it is fantastic.
I think this is a good idea for all hyperlocal bloggers. I’m not sure if I can hide a “page” with the theme I’m using, but I will check. Are you going to build links from Flickr back to your site, even though Flickr is nofollow?
Thanks for another helpful article.
Great conversation here, thanks for all the replies.
@Jason — I’ll update the topic page for this event every year with the new details like date, time, raffle prize, etc. But a lot of the stuff will stay the same. As long as the URL stays the same, it should eventually become the page that people find when they search for info about the event.
@Shafqat — I’ll be doing it manually. There are no feeds that I’m aware of related to this event that I could pull in. It’s very small-town stuff we’re talking about.
And yes, definitely need to write a good intro paragraph as you mentioned, something that will remain constant as an explanation of what the event is on a general level.
@Steve – yes, I do often link from Flickr photos back to blog posts where the photo is used, or where there’s more info related to the photo. It does occasionally send some traffic, even if there are no direct SEO benefits.
[...] been two weeks since I posted here on HLB about creating permanent topic pages for our hyperlocal blogs — an attempt to solve the problem of old blog posts getting search [...]
I just posted a brief update on this topic page experiment. You can see that at this URL:
http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com/update-topic-page-experiment/
[...] McGee at Hyperlocal Blogger has recently written a similar article about how he is creating hyperlocal topic pages. Matt is using SEO on his topic pages to drive additional traffic. Check it out if you would like [...]
[...] this for a koinkydink: Just when we’ve been talking a lot about topic pages for local blogs, Google announces a set of WordPress plugins for what it calls “Living Story [...]
[...] for this post about ongoing SEO, and it’s a reminder of something I wrote about previously: Topic Pages. These are useful when you find yourself blogging repeatedly about a single topic, like an annual [...]