Topics & rings

The keyword at the centre

Every map starts from one keyword. It sits in the hub at the centre and everything else is generated in relation to it. A good starting keyword is a subject you could build a whole site section around, not a single article title: Camping maps better than best tent pegs for wet ground.

Rings and sections

Around the keyword, TopicLoops generates three rings of subtopics. Ring 1 holds the broad sections of the subject, and each ring further out breaks the one before it into more specific pieces. Every map has the same shape: nine sections in ring 1, five subtopics under each of those in ring 2, and three under each of those in ring 3.

• Depth — which ring a subtopic sits in. Deeper means more specific and closer to the long-tail.
• Branch — a section together with everything nested beneath it. Branches are the natural unit of a content silo, and each one keeps its own colour across all four views.

Labels are deliberately short — one to four words, one concept each — so they stay readable in the visual views and map cleanly onto pages you might write.

Going deeper

The three rings are generated up front, and that is the full depth of a single map. To go further, click any subtopic and research it — that generates a fresh map with that subtopic at the centre, carrying the path it came from as context. See Research deeper.

Coverage

Once you analyze one of your pages against a map, every subtopic carries a coverage state: covered by that page, or not. Coverage is a property of the map, so the marks show up across all four views at once, and the uncovered subtopics are your content gaps.