Create | Expand | Optimize — What should you do with a recommendation?

Often, you’ll need to determine how well a topic aligns with a page. Here are the possibilities and suggested courses of action:

Direct match: Means the topic matches the subject of your page. Example — the topic you're assessing is “what is content strategy” and the subject of your page is also “what is content strategy”. If that page is your highest ranking one, then you should optimize the page for that topic.

Variation: Also includes misspellings. Example —  the topic in question is “what is a content strategy” and the subject of the page is “what is content strategy”. Ignore this situation as trying to satisfy the numerous variations almost always results in poor content.

Narrower: A situation like this occurs when the topic you're evaluating is more specific than the subject of the page. Example — the page is about “marketing” and a ranking topic is “social media marketing.” It’s easy to expand the page to incorporate this topic. Either create a section or a paragraph addressing that topic.

Broader: This occurs when the topic in question is less specific than the subject of the page. Example — the page is about “social media marketing” and the topic in question is “marketing”. Since that’s a higher-order and more general topic, the best course of action is to create a new page and link to the existing page.

Note: When Optimizing a page for its subject, pay attention to the Target Content Score and Word Count. When expanding a page, use the topic model to ensure the paragraph or section covers the topic — Target Content Score and Word Count do not apply.

If you’ve previously expanded the page for that topic, the next course of action is to create a new page focused on that topic and link to it from the existing page.