Topical Authority
Topical authority is the depth and breadth of a site's coverage of a subject. A site covering a topic thoroughly — the fundamentals, the comparisons, the costs, the edge cases — tends to rank better across all of it than one with a single page.
The mechanism is coverage of the question space rather than page count. Ten pages answering ten genuinely different questions build authority; ten pages restating the same topic with different keywords do not, and can dilute it.
It's why cluster structures work: a hub page for the topic, spokes for each sub-question, all interlinked so the relationship is explicit.
Why it matters
It explains why a competitor with a hundred articles outranks your one excellent page, and why the answer is a planned cluster rather than more of the same.
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