What is a topical map?

The plan answers "which pages are worth building now", ranked, with three verdicts each. The map answers a different question: "what is the complete set of pages for this subject, and in what order". The plan picks winners. The map covers a territory.

It lives on the Map tab of each site.

The five parts of the map plan

Before anything is built, the map has a plan, drafted from your confirmed profile and checked by you:

• Main topic. The one thing the site is about, site-wide. A short noun phrase, not a list.
• Why your site. One sentence on why your site is the one to cover it: what it does or sells, for whom. If there is no reason to rank, no map fixes that, and the map plan says so.
• What searchers want. What the searcher who should land here wants to do.
• Core topics. What the site sells, and what defines the main topic: its definition, its types, how it works.
• Left out of the map. Topics near the subject that the map leaves out, each with the reason.

Core and outer

Every page in the map sits in one of two sections. Core pages sell, or define the main topic. They are where the ranking signal collects. Outer pages cover the rest of the subject and build the site's record with the search engine; each links up to the core page it supports from its closing section. The rule that decides the section is shown on every page, with the record it rests on: the main topic, the fit judgments of the page's phrases, the core topics, an existing page.

Pages, headings and reserve

A topic gets its own page only when three of four checks hold: measured demand or a People Also Ask question, a distinct entity and attribute, a results page unlike its siblings, and a clear query pattern. A topic that fails becomes a heading on the page it folded into, so nothing is lost and nothing cannibalizes. Topics that passed but fell outside the map's size are held in reserve; a larger map would include them.

What every page carries

The phrases people type with their monthly volume, the results page behind it, the four checks of the page test, the section with its basis, its parents in the tree, its publish order with the reason, the links it gives and receives with their anchors, and a page decision with the three verdicts. Core pages are also inspected in full: the pages that rank are read, the opening is judged, and the site's chance of reaching the top ten is assessed, exactly as in the plan.

What it is not

Not a ranking guarantee, not a keyword list, and not a score. The map shows coverage as pages published out of pages mapped, and nothing called authority. The method follows what semantic SEO practitioners do when they build a map by hand; the parts that are rules a reader can check are computed as rules, and the parts that need judgment (attributes, parents, titles) come from the model with the sources shown.