Sites Have Little Control in Google SERPs

Over the years, Google has limited how websites can control their appearance in search results.

Here’s what sites cannot control in Google search.

Sitelinks

For some searches, especially involving brand names, Google shows links below the listing title. These are called sitelinks. Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm often displays sitelinks that are irrelevant or unimportant to the site’s business.

Owners have no control over these URLs. The only methods to remove a sitelink are to delete the page or add the noindex meta tag, but both would also remove the page from all Google searches.

Here are sitelinks for a “Practical Ecommerce” query:

Websites have little control over sitelinks, such as this example for Practical Ecommerce.

Listing title

The listing title is the most prominent section of a search snippet and largely influences the number of clicks. Google used to display only a page’s title tag for the listing.

A few years ago, however, Google began displaying titles based on search queries, for relevance. The result is often fewer clicks.

There’s no way to stop Google from rewriting a page title. Using an HTML title as an H1 heading increases the likelihood that Google will use it, in my experience, as it aligns the listing title with what searchers would see on the subsequent page.

Google now decides SERP listing titles based on the query, such as “how to build a website.”

Listing description

A page’s HTML meta description summarizes its content. Google has long considered meta descriptions as hints rather than directives. It displays meta descriptions only if relevant to the query.

Websites can influence listing descriptions, which appear below the title, by including on a page summary paragraphs, conclusions, and short answers. Depending on the query, Google could display part of those sections in a description.

Otherwise, sites have no control over the SERP snippet’s description.

A listing may or may not use the page’s HTML meta description.

AI Overviews

Google’s AI Overviews are artificial intelligence-generated answers on top of search results.

AI Overviews typically satisfy searchers’ needs, thereby eliminating the need to click. Hence many site owners prefer Google not to use their content in AI Overviews. I know no way to block Google from using a site’s content in AI Overviews while still indexing it for conventional SERPs.

Google’s Extended directive in a site’s robots.txt file blocks Gemini but not AI Overviews. A nosnippet meta tag will likely block AI Overviews, as well as all SERPs snippet descriptions.

AI Overviews typically satisfy searchers’ needs, thereby eliminating the need to click. This example is for the query “how to build a website.”

Featured snippets

Featured snippets used to appear at the top Google SERPs to provide quick answers to a query. They now appear in the middle of SERP pages, if at all, given the rise of AI Overviews.

Featured snippets typically decrease the number of clicks to a linked URL. Websites have no control over appearing in a featured snippet or its content.

A nosnippet meta tag instructs search engines not to display a page in featured snippet, but it also removes descriptions from the page’s non-featured listing.

A well-structured page — short FAQs, HTML headings, concise summaries — can influence the contents of a featured snippet, but there’s no guarantee.

In short, Google is reducing websites’ control over SERPs as it prioritizes what searchers seek.
Sites can influence their SERP appearance by focusing on concise content, well-structured pages, and appropriate headings.

Operationalizing Your Topic-First SEO Strategy via @sejournal, @Kevin_Indig

Last week, I walked through the shift from keyword-first to topic-first SEO – and why that mindset change matters more than ever for long-term visibility in both search and large language models (LLMs).

This week, we’re getting tactical. Because understanding the shift is one thing, operationalizing it across your team is another.

In this issue, Amanda and I are breaking down:

• How to build and use a topic map and matrix (with a map template for premium readers).
• Why a deep understanding of your audience is crucial to true topical depth.
• Guidance for internal + external linking by topic (with tool recommendations).
• For premium readers: Practical advice on measuring SEO performance by topic.

If you’re trying to build durable organic visibility and authority for your brand – and not just chase hacks for AI overviews – this is your blueprint.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

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How To Operationalize A Topic-First SEO Strategy

Last week, we covered how you need to shift from keywords to topics (if you haven’t already).

But what if you’re not quite sure how to operationalize this approach across your team?

Let’s talk about how to do that.

To earn lasting visibility – and not short-term visibility bought by hacky LLM visibility tricks – your brand needs to signal to search engines and LLMs that it’s an authority in topics related to your offerings for the intended audience you serve.

You’ll do this by:

1. Building a map of your parent topics.
2. Using audience research and personas as lenses to create content through.
3. Expanding with subtopics and “zero-volume” content creation, because fringe content adds depth.
4. Optimizing both your internal and external links with a topic-first approach.

Build A Map Of Your Parent Topics

First up, you need to build your topic map.

(You know, if you don’t already have an old doc or spreadsheet out there collecting dust, buried in your Google Drive, with your core topic pillars and subtopics already stored.)

This is the first step in building a thorough persona-based SEO topic matrix.

A topic matrix is a strategic framework that compiles your brand’s key topics, subtopics, and content formats needed to comprehensively cover a subject area for search visibility.

It helps align content with user intent, target personas, and search visibility opportunities, creating a roadmap for developing topical authority and minimizing keyword cannibalization.

If you haven’t built one before, this is going to look different from keyword lists of the past, and it might be organized like this:

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

Amanda interjecting here: Even if you have built one before, stick with us. We’ve got a visual for you below that will help communicate to stakeholders how/why a topic-first approach matters to earning visibility and authority for your brand’s core offerings. Plus, premium subscribers get the ready-to-go template.

Later, once your topic matrix is complete, you’ll use your keyword universe to select priority keywords to pair with your overall topic and individual pages.

Instead of living in keyword lists, you’ll live in a topic map, prioritizing meeting the needs of separate personas or ideal customer profiles (ICPs) in your target audience, and later pairing search queries that best help the people you serve find you.

To start building a list of your parent topics, you need to:

• Outline the exact topics your brand needs to own. This is where you start. (And many of you reading this already have this locked in.).
• Inventory your existing content: What topics do you cover already? What topics do we actually need to cover? Where are the gaps? Which ones convert the best?
• Make sure you log all your core offerings (i.e., features, services, core products) as topics or subtopics themselves.

These are the “buckets” under which all other content should logically live (regardless of the persona, funnel stage, or search intent you’re optimizing for).

Think of them as your brand’s semantic backbone, so to speak … these are the foundational topics that every page ultimately ladders up to.

Here’s how to determine them:

1. Start with your offerings.

• What services do you provide?
• What features or products do you sell?
• What problems do you solve?

2. Group offerings into themes.

• Which of those offerings can be grouped under a broader topic?
• What high-level conversations do your users consistently return to?

3. Refine for relevance.

• You’re aiming for topics broad enough to support many subtopics, but specific enough to reflect your unique authority in your area of expertise.

Let’s look at an example of a fictional DTC brand that also offers some B2B services: Kind Habitat. (Needs a better name, but let’s move on. 😆)

Kind Habitat offers eco-friendly home furnishings and sustainable materials via a small ecommerce store as well as residential and commercial interior design services.

Let’s say its target audience includes homeowners, renters, residential and commercial property managers, as well as both residential builders and designers that focus on sustainability and eco-friendly values.

With that in mind, its ecommerce products and design services could all be mapped to five simplified but distinct core topics:

• Sustainable interior design.
• Eco-friendly building materials.
• Zero-waste living.
• Sustainable furniture shopping.
• Green home upgrades.

Every piece of content they create should tie back to one or more of these core topics, and that ensures the site builds deep, durable authority in its niche.

(And keep in mind, this is a simplified example here. You might have up to 10 parent topics … or more, depending on the breadth of your offerings or expertise areas.)

Next up, you’re going to work to expand your topic map, starting with audience research.

Use Audience Research And Personas

Here’s where those personas your brand invested so heavily in come into play.
You’ll need to map out (1) who you’re solving problems for and (2) how their queries change based on unique persona, intent, audience type, or industry sector.

But how do you know if you’ve identified the right people (personas) and their queries?

You can spend tens of thousands investing in deep buyer persona market research.

But if your resources are limited, talk to your sales team. Talk to your customer care team. And (gasp) talk to your customers and/or leads who didn’t buy from you.

And if you’re just starting out and don’t have sales or customer teams in place, have your founder dig into their email inbox, LinkedIn DMs, etc., and mine for information.

As Spartoro’s Amanda Natividad states in “How to Turn Audience Research Into Content Ideas” (a great read, btw):

Questions are content gold. Each question represents an information gap you can fill with valuable content. ^[1]

Then, your job is to take the collected information gaps and fold them into your overall topic matrix.

Keep in mind, though, when optimizing for your core topics, you’ll also need to target different intents across the topic and the funnel via different perspectives, painpoints, and viewpoints (a.k.a. “ranch style SEO”).

Here’s an exciting bonus to investing in this approach: Persona-aligned content that offers deep topic coverage and unique perspectives can bring natural information gain to the overall topical conversation.

I (Kevin) opened up this discussion on topics vs. keywords over on LinkedIn, and I have to say, Tommy Walker gives an excellent example of how he thinks about this topic expansion in the thread:

Screenshot from LinkedIn, July 2025 (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

Your topics can be expanded exponentially in many directions, based on the people you’re creating content for and the problems they have:

People:

• Core audiences.
• Crafted personas.
• Multiple sectors (if applicable to your product or service).

Problems:

• Core problem/needs your brand solves for each audience.
• Unique problems experienced by each persona that your brand solves.
• Core problems unique to multiple sectors (and in the language of those sectors).

Let’s circle back to our fictional example with Kind Habitat, that sustainable interior design firm with a quickly-made-up name and a mini ecommerce store.

Here’s what their “people and problems” that they’d optimize their core topics for would look like:

People:

• Core audiences: Homeowners, renters, property managers, builders, designers.
• Crafted personas:
  • Homeowner: Stan, 45, high-income earner, second-time homeowner in suburban area, looking to renovate sustainably.
  • Renter: Nicole, 31, mid-income earner, long-term rent-controlled apartment in a big city with values of sustainability, who is researching sustainable home decor and design.
  • Property Manager: Quinn, 25, mid-income earner, entry-level property manager for small local firm that values zero-waste construction and sustainable renovations.
  • Builder: JP, 57, high-income earner, owns sustainable building firm, seeking zero-waste, low-toxin approach to new builds and prioritizing energy-efficient design in luxury homes.
  • Designer: Sydney, 29, mid-income earner, junior to mid-level associate at a commercial interior design firm seeking both products and plans for sustainable furnishings and design.
• Multiple sectors (if applicable to your product or service): Residential real estate, property managers for multi-family housing, real estate portfolios, or commercial real estate, sustainable building firms, individual homeowners, and renters interested in sustainable design.

Keep in mind, you could fan out your audience even further with three to five individual audience personas under each audience type.

And once your audience data is finally ready to go, you’d then expand into the problems faced by each audience, persona, and sector across each targeted topic.

Once you have your core topics covered (and have addressed your core features, offerings, services, audience pain points, and organic audience questions, etc.), you’d expand even further into content that offers unique perspectives, hot takes, and even digs into current events related to your industry or product/services.

That’s … a lot of content.

Using Amanda’s topic map visual, here’s what it could look like … for just one parent topic.

You could just keep going. For-ev-er.

(But your content doesn’t have to. If you establish your brand as an authority by publishing content with depth of coverage and information gain baked in, you can accomplish a lot with a tight, well-developed library of pages.)

Here’s what I’d recommend if you have the team members or freelancers on hand:

• Assign specific team members or freelancers to cover core topics. Essentially, you’d have trained writer-SMEs for each major topic you’d like to target across your strategy. That way, content can be produced more accurately … and faster.
• Divvy up work based on personas. If you have multiple audience types, like the Kind Habitat example, assign production to your team based on different personas/audiences, so your content producers can hone in on the needs of – and the way they speak to – each persona.
• Use AI to scale topic coverage while tailoring to persona type. A tool like AirOps can help you build out workflows based on specific topics and specific personas; that way, you’re creating iterations of core pieces of work geared toward the specific needs, pain points, and problems of each industry sector, persona, etc.
• When refreshing older content to combat content decay, refresh by topics. Don’t just refresh one page that has experienced a decline. Work on keeping content decay in check by refreshing subtopics/clusters as a whole whenever possible. Assign one producer/individual contributor to work on the cluster of related pages.

Expand With Subtopics, Because Fringe Content Adds Depth

Once you’ve mapped your audience and their problems across your core topics, you need to expand your coverage with subtopics, especially the ones that live on the edges and directly speak to your target ICPs.
This is the kind of content that rarely shows up in a traditional keyword list, although you can definitely map specific keywords and intents to these pages in order to adjacently optimize for organic visibility.

However, you won’t always have a clear “search volume” number for this type of content.

Sometimes this content is going to be messy. Sometimes it’s going to be weird.

You need to thoroughly know your core audience and understand their most pressing needs and questions that you can solve for. (Even the fringe ones.)

But this “fringe content” is what makes your site actually helpful, authoritative, and hard to replicate.

Think of it this way: The best organic search strategies don’t just optimize for the top 10 questions on a topic – they anticipate the next 100.

They dig into the side doors, caveats, gotchas, exceptions, industry language quirks, and debates.

You must go beyond building clusters and instead build context for your brand within your targeted topic.

Here’s where to look when expanding with meaningful subtopics:

1. Sales calls with leads, customer care questions, and actual customer interviews: There’s a gold mine here, and every brand has it. (Yes, even yours.) Use it to your advantage. I recommend tools like Gong/Chorus + Humata AI to help.
2. Reddit + Quora discussions: Look for questions that no one has great concrete answers to or resources/solutions for. Use a tool like Gummy Search to streamline this research.
3. Context that will build out your topic environment: You’re not just building a tidy cluster with “best X tools,” “top tools for Y,” and “X vs Y.” Ask: What misconceptions need to be cleared up? What advanced tips only experts talk about when they talk shop? Lean on your internal SMEs, or invest in paying SMEs hourly, getting connected to them via platforms like JustAnswer.
4. Wikipedia table of contents and footnotes: While this might initially sound like strange guidance, if you truly feel you’ve covered your core topics for all your ICPs from multiple perspectives and for all their common pain points, this approach can help you branch out into connected subtopics. Caveat: Of course, don’t invest in covering subtopics that don’t matter to your ICPs … or angles they already understand thoroughly. (This research is very manual. If you have a workaround you’d suggest, send it my way.)
5. People Also Ask questions in the SERP: Keep these in mind: They still exist for a reason. Use your standard SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc., to explore these within your topic.

So, with topic-first optimization at the center, should you be organizing your internal links by topic instead of just navigation structure or blog recency?

Um, yes – definitely. And if you weren’t doing that already, the time to start is now.

Topic-based internal linking is one of the most powerful (and underutilized) ways to reinforce topical authority.

Most content teams default to one of two internal linking strategies:

1. Navigation-based linking: whatever shows up in your menu or footer.
2. Date-based linking: linking to “recent posts” regardless of topic relevance.

The problem? These methods serve the convenience of the content management system (CMS), not the reader or search engine.

A topic-first internal linking strategy intentionally:

• Connects all relevant pages under a single topic or persona target.
• Links related subtopics together to increase crawl depth and surface additional value.
• Boosts orphaned or underperforming assets with contextually relevant links.

You can simplify this task with an SEO tool like Clearscope, Surfer, Ahrefs, etc. (For convenience, the pages explaining how these features work per tool are linked here.)

For example, tools like these surface internal linking opportunities within the pages you’re monitoring within the tool. The feature then gives you clear related anchor text on where to add the URLs specifically.

The manual part? Having your content producers or SEO analysts determine if the tool’s suggested page is in the right topic cluster to warrant an anchor link. (But you can also set up topic clusters/content segments within tools like Clerascope that can help guide your producers.)

Used with permission from 4aGoodCause, a top monthly giving platform for nonprofits. (Link)

But you should be employing a topic-based backlink strategy, too.

You don’t just want backlinks. You want links that have authority in your target topics and/or with your audience.

For instance, our example from earlier, Kind Habitat, doesn’t need low-quality backlinks from around the globe to build topical authority in the sustainable interior design niche.

This brand needs to invest in backlinks that include:

• High-authority sites in similar topics, like ThisOldHouse.com, MarthaStewart.com, Houzz.com, and HomeAdvisor.com.
• Local and regional publications for this brand’s service areas.
• Manufacturers of sustainable, low-toxin home building products and materials.
• Professional associations for interior designers, builders, and property managers who value sustainable and green design.

Here’s the payoff of taking a topic-first approach: Once you shift your strategy to cover core topics deeply – across the right audience segments and intent layers – you unlock a Topical Authority Flywheel.

Here’s how it works:

Better coverage → Better engagement and organic links → Better visibility across more queries.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

When your site deeply addresses a topic, you not only become more useful to your audience, but you also are more visible to search engines and LLMs.

You build the kind of brand context that LLMs surface and that Google’s evolving AI-driven results reward.

And yes, it’s measurable.

Track your performance by topic, not just by page or keyword.

If you’ve mapped and organized your content well, you can group related URLs and monitor how the topic as a whole performs:

• Watch how refreshed or expanded topic clusters improve in average rank, CTR, and conversions over time.
• Look for early signals of lift within the first 10-30 days after refreshing or publishing a comprehensive set of content on a given topic.
• Monitor link velocity. Strong topic clusters reap rewards.

Operationalizing a topic-first approach isn’t just about traffic.

It’s about building a defensible edge in search/LLM visibility by doing the thing many brands still are missing out on: going deep, not wide.

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal