In a neverending quest to find better ways to optimize content, you will often find a few rabbit holes to go down.

One of those for me is paragraph optimization. Or structure. Well, a bit of both.

There's a big difference between a regular paragraph and a topic paragraph. It's also something that makes a big difference to SEO.

Paragraph:

Typically, a paragraph contains a topic sentence that introduces the main idea of the paragraph. The sentences that follow provide supporting details, examples, explanations, or evidence to develop and reinforce that main idea. The last sentence of the paragraph may serve as a concluding sentence, summarizing the key points or transitioning to the next paragraph.

Topic Paragraph:

A topic paragraph is a specific type of paragraph often used in essays, research papers, or academic writing. It is typically found at the beginning of an essay and serves as the opening paragraph that introduces the main topic or subject of the piece.

So how does knowing this help you with SEO?

Let's look at a regular paragraph on the topic of the benefits of regular exercise and run it through Google's NLP demo.

This gives us a return of 20 entities in a single paragraph. Not bad but only a % of these are important for SEO purposes.

What about the topic paragraph?

This one gives us a total of 25 entities but arguably that's not important seeing as there are more words.

What it does give us is better entities:

• Advantages
• Health Benefits
• Fitness Levels

These are broader concepts and things that Google wants to see for EEAT.

Clearly, both approaches offer different benefits. What's been clear to me through experimentation is that topic paragraphs are underused.

What seems to work well is:

• One topic paragraph per 3-4 regular paragraphs
• Usually, they work best underneath the headings
• With the exception of the conclusion

Another thing you can do is use AI to write or rewrite existing paragraphs to update your content easily. Check out that link for the example.

Main takeaway

What I have learned in the last year or so is that we sometimes place too much emphasis on entities directly.

Topics subsume entities, meaning that if you can cover a topic with a well-written sentence or paragraph we seem to naturally include the most important entities.

What I've found even more interesting is how when you add entities without the relevant topic context you don't get the same results.

Grab your favorite AI tool and start using that to your advantage to improve existing content because our industry will wake up to this fact sooner rather than later.