Climbing the Ranks: How Topical Authority is Redefining Enterprise SEO and Demand Generation

The Game Has Changed

What if I told you that the strategies powering your favorite local businesses on Google could never scale to national success? And what if I told you exactly why?

For years, I’ve helped rank thousands of websites, from small local sites to major national sites for some of the largest brands in their industry (e.g. eXp Realty, Garmin, Home Depot, and many others), driving hundreds of millions of visitors and countless brand impressions. I’ve seen what works—and what doesn’t—across industries and at every level.

Local SEO is an incredible tool for businesses focused on a single area. It’s how a real estate agent in Atlanta or a contractor in Denver can own their market and generate predictable results.

But scaling that success to regional or national SEO? It’s an entirely different ballgame. While local SEO focuses on optimizing for a narrow audience and search space, enterprise SEO—especially for large-scale sites like national portals or businesses with thousands of locations—requires a different strategy with mostly different implementation. The game has changed, and it’s no longer about sprinkling keywords, writing 750-1500 word posts, or targeting a single geography.

The shift to topical authority—where search engines like Google prioritize expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness (EEAT) at scale—has rewritten the rules.

Understanding this shift isn’t optional for anyone aiming to compete at a national or enterprise level. It’s the difference between staying in the game and being left behind.

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SEO’s Role in Brand Growth and the Bigger Picture

Most people think of SEO as a tool for improving rankings or driving more clicks, but the reality is much bigger. For companies like Indeed, Home Depot, or Zillow, search is far more than just traffic. It’s the single largest driver of brand impressions and long-term growth. These businesses generate a level of visibility that would be financially impossible to achieve with paid advertising alone.

To put it into perspective, imagine running paid campaigns to match the billions of visits these companies receive annually through organic search. The cost would bankrupt even the largest budgets. Even at 5M – 10M monthly visits, the budget does not exist — and even if it did, there are better ways to invest and apply that capital.

This isn’t about incremental growth—it’s about creating a compounding effect where your website becomes synonymous with your industry.

But this shift in thinking applies beyond Google. The world of search has diversified dramatically. Platforms like Amazon, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and even AI-driven engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are shaping how people discover brands and content.

Here’s a striking takeaway from a recent NP Digital study:

• Google accounts for just 18% of global searches, when you look at everywhere people search.
• Other platforms, like Amazon (3.5 billion searches/day) and Instagram (6.5 billion searches/day), collectively dominate the landscape.
• Mobile app stores account for at least 5 billion searches annually in the U.S., based on 12.5+ billion app downloads. 

If your strategy is limited to Google, you’re missing 4 out of 5 opportunities to capture attention. Modern SEO isn’t just about ranking on Google—it’s about optimizing across the platforms your audience uses daily.

Even if your past SEO and brand efforts haven’t delivered the ROI you expected, or you’ve seen success at a local or regional level, the rules for national and enterprise SEO are different. Don’t let outdated strategies hold your company back. If you want to compete with the titans in your industry—or even surpass them—understanding topical authority is non-negotiable.

The Shift from Traditional to Topical Authority in SEO

For years, traditional SEO has been the backbone of online visibility for local businesses. It works well because it focuses on optimizing a website to rank for specific keywords and geographical areas. Think of a real estate agent targeting “Atlanta townhomes for sale” or a contractor optimizing for “Denver bathroom remodels.” The strategy is straightforward: pick your keywords, create some high-quality content, build local backlinks, and make sure your site is technically sound.

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This approach has worked—and still works—exceptionally well for small-scale businesses with a defined service area. It’s why local SEO remains a powerful tool for real estate agents, contractors, and lawyers who need to dominate their immediate markets. Give me a small local site and I’d almost guarantee that dozens people I have texted with in the past month could rank that site and grow your business.

But scaling this same strategy to a regional or national level? That’s where things change dramatically.

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The Rise of Topical Authority

Search engines like Google and Bing have fundamentally shifted how they rank websites. The goal is no longer just to find sites that match a keyword—it’s to identify sites that demonstrate expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness (EEAT) across an entire topic or industry.

Topical authority is the new gold standard, especially for large-scale sites with regional or national ambitions. The idea is simple but profound: search engines reward websites that comprehensively cover a subject. This doesn’t just mean having a few blog posts or landing pages; it means becoming the definitive resource on a topic.

Here’s where it gets tricky: if your site covers a broad area, like real estate across the U.S., you’re not just competing at a national level—you’re competing at a hyperlocal level, too. Google expects your site to be authoritative not only on real estate overall but also on individual locations.

And the real question is how does Google (and other search engines) determine if your site is authoritative.

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Understanding the Technical Challenge

This shift isn’t just theoretical—it’s backed by patents and real-world evidence. A recent Google API leak confirmed what industry leaders like Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR (leader of the mastermind I’m in and the father of the term “topical authority”) have long emphasized: crawling and indexing are now deeply tied to topical authority.

Think about it this way:

• A local real estate site focused on Atlanta might have 40,000–60,000 total pages, which Google can easily crawl and index in its entirety.
• A national real estate portal with coverage across 19,500 cities and 41,000 ZIP codes could easily have 250,000 hyperlocal landing pages and 5 million total pages.

Here’s the problem: Google doesn’t crawl everything.

In the first few quarters, it might only crawl 0.1% to 1% of those pages. That’s 200,000–500,000 pages out of 5 million, distributed across thousands of locations. While your site may have more data, better UX, and richer content than a local competitor, Google won’t see enough of it at first to deem your site authoritative in any one area.

As Koray puts it,

“You have to convince Google to crawl your entire site.”

This requires not just technical excellence but also a strategic approach to linking, content organization, and demonstrating authority in stages.

And, what most CEOs and even most CMOs miss is that this is the #1 thing holding back the growth of your brand with your potential customers. It’s about demand generation not simply lead generation.

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Why This Matters

Let’s break this down with an example.

Imagine you have a local real estate site focused on Atlanta. Google can crawl the entire site—let’s say **60,000 pages—all of which are dedicated to Atlanta’s market. From Google’s perspective, the site is a comprehensive and highly authoritative resource for that specific area.

Now, consider the national real estate portal example we just talked about covering thousands of cities, with a total of 5 million pages. Google might crawl just 200,000–500,000 pages in the first few quarters. But those crawled pages are spread across the entire country, covering dozens or hundreds of locations.

Here’s the dilemma:

• On an industry-wide level, your national site may be more authoritative because of its scale and the depth of its content across multiple regions.
• But on a local level—let’s say Atlanta—Google has only crawled a small fraction of the relevant pages. As a result, your national site appears less authoritative for that specific market compared to a local competitor.

With each crawl, Google revisits some of the previously crawled pages and explores another small percentage of the site. Over time, the crawler gradually builds a more complete picture of your site’s content. But even then, the indexing process filters what’s considered most relevant and authoritative.

Getting there takes time and expertise. But once you achieve topical authority, the results are exponential. Your site doesn’t just rank—it becomes the go-to resource, driving brand impressions, traffic, and revenue on a scale that traditional SEO can’t match.

The Athletic Parallel: Skill Levels and Progression

SEO, like sports, demands increasing levels of skill, strategy, and mastery as you move up the competitive ladder. Not all marketers need to play at the “varsity” or “professional” levels of enterprise SEO—but for those who aim to compete nationally or regionally, the skills required become increasingly specialized.

Here’s a progression table that mirrors the challenges in SEO, starting from foundational skills to the elite expertise needed for enterprise-level success:

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Level	% Advancing from Previous Level	% from Initial Pool	Description
Youth Sports	100%	100%	No real specialization. Everyone participates.
Junior Varsity High School	~50%	~50%	Initial skill development, but still foundational.
Varsity High School	~40%	~20%	Players start to demonstrate high-level competence.
College (D3)	~3%	~6%	Competing requires skill and consistent practice.
College (D2)	~2%	~3%	Higher level of competition; athletes must excel even more.
College (D1)	~1.5%	~1.5%	Elite players competing at the top of the collegiate level.
Professional	<1%	<0.1%	Mastery, strategy, and execution at the highest level.

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Each level represents a significant narrowing of the talent pool, with an exponential increase in the skills and dedication required to succeed. For example:

• At the youth sports level, anyone can participate, and while some skills are taught, specialization is minimal.
• By varsity high school, players need to consistently show competence and start excelling in their roles.
• At the collegiate level, competition becomes intense, with Division 3 athletes still requiring significant skill and strategy, Division 2 athletes pushing further into advanced performance, and Division 1 athletes operating at the top of the talent pool.
• Finally, professional athletes are the absolute elite, mastering not only the physical skills but also the strategic nuances of their sport.

Whether you’re talking golf, cross country, football, or modern marketing, this principle holds in the real world.

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SEO Expertise: Parallel Progression

Just as few athletes make it to the professional level, only a small percentage of marketers have the expertise to succeed at enterprise SEO. This isn’t a reflection of overall talent or worth but rather the level of specialization and strategy required to “play” at the national or global scale.

Local SEO, like youth or JV sports, focuses on foundational skills and techniques. But enterprise SEO—particularly at the national or regional scale—requires deep technical knowledge, strategic vision, and the ability to build topical authority across millions of pages.

It’s not just about creating good content or optimizing for a handful of keywords. At this level, marketers need to:

• Orchestrate massive site architectures that connect millions of pages.
• Convince search engines like Google to crawl and index those pages.
• Build and sustain authority across highly competitive markets.
• Then, integrate all of that into a cohesive brand framework that gets distributed throughout all channels and touchpoints.

As in sports, moving up the levels requires not just effort, but mastery.

The Challenges of Scaling Topical Authority: Why Most Companies Fail

Building topical authority at scale isn’t just about having the right tools or creating more content. It’s about aligning your marketing, content, and engineering teams with a strategy that’s rooted in both technical expertise and a deep understanding of your industry.

From my time leading SEO efforts at eXp Realty, now the largest real estate brokerage in the country that we grew from 31k agents to 88k agents, and my time with consulting with many larger brands across industries, I’ve seen firsthand how challenging this can be. Most companies embarking on a similar journey fail—not because the concept is flawed, but because they lack the specialized skills across their teams to execute effectively.

Here’s where the pitfalls often lie:

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1. Misguided Reliance on Tools Like BrightEdge or Botify

BrightEdge, Botify, and JetOctopus are powerful tools, but they are only as good as the team interpreting their recommendations.

For example, these platforms may make excellent suggestions for global retail brands like Adidas, where category pages and product optimization are key. However, for a real estate portal managing hyperlocal SEO—with thousands of ZIP code pages and localized market trends—many of these suggestions could inadvertently harm your efforts. The same applies for franchises with hundreds or thousands of locations as well as job boards like Indeed, and many other industries.

The tools aren’t inherently wrong—they’re just not designed to account for the nuances of every industry. If your team doesn’t deeply understand the differences, you could end up chasing metrics that don’t align with your goals.

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2. Tracking Long-Tail Keywords: The Limits of Ahrefs and SEMrush

Ahrefs and SEMrush are invaluable for competitive analysis and tracking shorter, higher-volume keywords. But when your success hinges on capturing long-tail keyword traffic—such as “best townhomes for families in ZIP code 30303″—these tools quickly hit their limits.

Real estate portals, for instance, rely on massive volumes of long-tail queries to dominate local search results. Tracking these effectively requires either a highly scalable tool like BrightEdge or custom-built internal solutions. Without this level of granularity, it’s impossible to truly understand your performance across tens of thousands of localized pages.

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3. The Disconnect Between Teams

Even with the right tools and data, execution often fails because marketing, content, and engineering teams don’t collaborate effectively. Building topical authority requires:

• Marketing teams that understand the strategic vision.
• Content teams capable of producing deeply localized, data-driven content at scale.
• Engineering teams that can optimize site performance, internal linking structures, and crawling efficiency.
• Engineering teams and marketing teams that are genuinely curious about what the other is asking for and why.

Without this alignment, even the best-laid plans will fall short.

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The Path Forward: Strategic Execution at Scale

To build topical authority and succeed at enterprise SEO, it’s critical to recognize that tools alone won’t win the game. You need a team with the skills and strategic insight to:

• Adapt recommendations from tools like BrightEdge and Botify to the unique challenges of your industry.
• Develop internal systems or leverage advanced platforms to track long-tail keyword performance.
• Foster collaboration between marketing, content, and engineering to execute a unified strategy.

When these elements come together, the results speak for themselves. It’s not easy, but it’s what separates the companies that dominate their industries from those that never get off the ground.

The Future: Topical Authority and Modern Demand Generation

Demand generation has become the backbone of hypergrowth for modern brands. Unlike traditional lead generation—which focuses on short-term wins—demand generation is about building sustained awareness, trust, and preference for your brand at scale. It’s a longer game, but the payoff is exponential – in the end, this is what most investors are looking for.

What makes this approach even more critical now is the role of AI and machine learning in reshaping how brands are discovered and perceived. Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI snippets are changing the way users search, consume information, and make decisions.

These systems don’t simply rely on individual keywords; they are trained on patterns, relationships, and authority across topics—making topical authority foundational for success.

When someone asks a generative AI, “What’s the best platform for finding homes privately?” or “What’s the best solution for fixing this plumbing issue we’re having?” the answer isn’t random. It’s influenced by the content, expertise, and authority your brand has built—not just on Google but across the entire digital ecosystem.

You’re not just optimizing for search engines anymore—you’re training the AI that powers them. This requires marketers to think differently:

1. Focus on creating demand, not just leads. Being present across AI-driven platforms defines how your brand is viewed in your space.
2. Elevate topical authority. Building a foundation of interconnected, high-value content isn’t optional—it’s a requirement to own your industry.

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Making Your Company the Authority in Your Industry

Becoming the largest player in your industry and building the topical authority isn’t just about rankings; it’s about owning the conversation in your industry. It’s about becoming the definitive resource that users, platforms, and AI trust to deliver accurate, valuable insights.

These principles aren’t theoretical—I’ve seen them shape industries and drive massive growth. Whether scaling enterprise SEO for platforms like eXp Realty or driving innovation in demand generation, the goal has always been the same: to lead by providing more value and earning more trust than anyone else.

The companies that embrace this shift are the ones shaping the future. Those that don’t risk being left behind or missing out on a “what could have been”, wondering why they’re no longer part of the conversation.

What challenges have you faced in building topical authority or scaling from local to national? Comment below. If this resonates with you, follow me for more insights, and let’s keep redefining what’s possible in enterprise SEO and demand generation.