Understanding Topic Clusters
Topic Clusters
A topic cluster refers to a group of content that branches off from a central page. While the main page covers a broader theme, clusters are broken down into more specific subtopics, providing your website with thorough, informative, and helpful content.
Suppose you stumbled across a main page discussing why you should invest in social media marketing services. Intrigued, you look for more information on how to get started with growing your brand’s social media presence, like ways to boost your engagement, how to use social media for your small business, and more. Soon enough, you decide to contact the social media marketing experts at TechWyse to assist you with your next social media campaign.
This demonstrates how necessary content clusters are for attracting potential leads to your website and keeping them invested. Moreover, a cluster of topics uses different levels of web pages to organize your content, making them easier for both users and search engines to navigate. Not only will this help enhance user experience and search rankings, but it can also boost your website authority.
Pillar Page
We know you’re here to learn about the significance of content clusters. However, in the same way that all superheroes have their own unique origin story that’s worth exploring, we can’t continue talking about topic clusters without addressing where they come from.
Topic clusters are connected to a broader topic or webpage, also known as a pillar page. A pillar page provides a more comprehensive overview of the main topic, whereas content clusters address particular areas related to it in greater detail. Think of the pillar page as the sun and the content clusters as planets orbiting around it!
Source: Ten Speed
Let’s say you want to create a pillar page about the importance of content marketing, for example. As you can probably tell, content marketing is already a very broad area of digital marketing that offers a lot of scope for tackling other relevant, more focused topics. You can create a content cluster revolving around the different aspects of the content marketing process, whether it be about how to get started with blogging, selecting the right keywords or creating a foolproof content marketing strategy.
Internal Linking
By now, we already know that pillar pages and topic clusters share topics, but there’s one more thing that keeps these pages interconnected: internal linking.
Internal linking involves the process of adding a link to one page on your website that brings you to another. This strategy allows you to group your themed pages into different clusters. At the same time, it notifies search engines, like Google, about which content is related.
Remember to always use your content clusters to link to your pillar pages. Effectively using internal linking allows those pages to be detectable by search engines, which can prevent the wrong page from ranking for the wrong search terms. Similarly, you need to also include links to your content clusters in their relevant pillar pages.
It’s also crucial to avoid excessive linking to pages outside of the content cluster. You can definitely link to other pages that aren’t related to your cluster, but it’s important to maintain a balance. Bear in mind that it’s pivotal to use internal linking to optimize your content clusters, not to link to every single page on your website.
Now that we know about topic clusters, pillar pages, and internal linking and why they’re important, how can they help benefit your SEO?
How Topic Clusters Elevate Your SEO
Topic clusters are an essential component for bolstering your SEO strategy. Let’s take a look at the following five ways you can use them to improve your search rankings:
1. Embrace Google’s Ranking System
Google goes far beyond keywords to deliver relevant search results to users. Since October 5, 2015, the search engine has used RankBrain to gain insights into users’ journeys. RankBrain is powered by AI and machine learning systems and assists Google with predicting the steps users will take as they go about their journey.
The average person experiences five stages of the customer journey: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy.
During the awareness stage, the customer becomes aware of a specific company’s services by searching for certain information related to their key interest. Subsequently, they enter the consideration stage, where they start to weigh out their options and compare your services to competitors, before transitioning to making a purchase. These initial stages illustrate the importance of having valuable content on your website that educates and informs your intended audience, driving them to ultimately make a decision.
In addition to assisting the customer throughout their journey, pillar pages and content clusters also have a profound impact on your rankings in search engines. When subtopics rank high enough on Google, they can stay more relevant to users than other competitors' pages. As a result, potential customers are more likely to start and end their journey with you by exploring your website and perusing your content, before eventually investing in your products/services.
2. Amplify the Context of Pages
We’ve already discussed how content clusters can boost your web content’s SEO value through search rankings. But did you know they also help Google determine a page's relevance for every user?
Google uses one key factor to find out what each page is about—context.
Context can be drawn from various areas of a written piece of content. From optimized images, meta descriptions, headings and subheadings to keywords, anchor text, and the URL itself. Although these are examples of on-page SEO, you can also include a combination of off-page elements for further content contextualization.
Source: Weidert Group
3. Elevate Your Keyword Research
Topic clusters originate from their main pillar page, but how can you decide what these subtopics should even be about? The answer is quite simple: keywords.
When mapping out a content cluster, you can organize them into different categories by using keywords. Keywords allow you to place these subtopics into different groups that are relevant to every stage of the buyer’s journey as well as their intent.
As you can see, content clusters give you the opportunity to select specific keywords and highly relevant search terms. At the same time, they also help identify low-competition keywords you can aim to rank for to boost your search rankings (but we’ll discuss selecting keywords in more detail later).
4. Follow the User Journey
When it comes to the user’s journey, one important thing to note is that the purpose of content clusters is to answer specific queries or problems that are more likely to engage and delight customers.
If someone comes across your website and finds everything they need, they will continue delving into the content related to the pillar page that led them to your site. By using the right techniques to organize and post your clusters, you can provide more value to your visitors and persuade them to choose your services over those of your competitors.
It’s paramount to support potential customers in their journey by keeping the starting point in mind—that’s where a content cluster comes in handy. It allows you to anticipate their needs, answer their burning questions and convince them to make the big purchase.
5. Bolster Local SEO
Local SEO allows local businesses to appear in unpaid, location-based search results for Google Search, Google Maps, and several other search engines. When businesses rank for local keywords, they will likely attract more customers who will engage with them. However, where do content clusters come in all of this?
Using content clusters can benefit your local SEO by helping you rank higher in local SERPs. This means that by researching local trends, keywords, topics and pain points, you can use content clusters to improve content localization.
When you cluster topics around local topics and trends that will have a profound impact on a local audience, you are creating a winning cluster content strategy that will allow your brand to expand into those areas and dominate specific markets.
Source: Shutterstock
Tips to Create a Cluster Content Strategy
Now, it’s time to dive into the six steps you need to follow to power up your content cluster strategy:
1. Selecting a Core Topic
The first step to creating a foolproof content cluster strategy is to find a core topic around which your subtopics will revolve.
One way to get started is to use your audience personas to help you decide on your topic’s overarching theme. Consider the following key areas: a challenge that your target audience is experiencing, a broad topic with a huge search volume and if it’s relevant to your brand.
After deciding on a pillar topic, you need to make sure that your subtopics stay relevant to the main idea being discussed. Even though each cluster is expected to stand on its own, it should still help contribute to the pillar page’s topic.
2. Conducting Keyword Research
With this step, you need to make sure that your chosen keyword has an audience that is searching for them. Ahrefs and Semrush are some great tools that can give you insights into the volume of keywords.
Another helpful feature the tools have is that they show relevant questions people are searching, as well as parent topics, in regard to a specific keyword. This can help you brainstorm particular subtopics for your own content cluster.
Next, you should look for the top-ranking keywords in Google’s search results for your specific pillar content and examine the topic clusters used within your competitor’s content. By doing so, you can get a ready-made list of subtopics that you can gain inspiration from.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can turn to Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes, knowledge panels or auto-suggest, to find more commonly asked questions and answers that your competitors possibly didn’t cover.
3. Create a Topical Map
While creating a topical map, you need to establish a topic hierarchy and cluster structure. But where do you begin?
First, identify your core topic after conducting keyword research, as mentioned in the previous step. Next, compile a list of relevant questions you have gathered that are related to the keyword people search for. Use this list to brainstorm subtopics relevant to the main theme of your pillar content. Once that’s done, create the hierarchy by connecting your main topic with your subtopics through semantic language, like interlinking.
Take a look at the following topical map as an example:
Source: Coschedule
Tip: A simple trick you can follow to keep your topics organized is to analyze their keyword difficulty, search volume, and relevancy to the main pillar topic.
And now, you have a solid topical map and can officially start churning quality content!
4. Develop a Pillar Page & Content Cluster
At this point in the process, you already know the main topics and subtopics for your content cluster, so which type of content should you create? Well, we have good news for you—the possibilities are endless!
When planning your content cluster, you don’t have to feel limited to publishing solely blog posts. You can create various different types of content, whether that be an infographic, interactive webpage, or an explainer video. By experimenting with different mediums, you’re giving users access to more digestible information, which will definitely set you apart from your competitors. If you’re having difficulty deciding which type of content you should try your luck at, ask yourself what your audience would like seeing and how it would add value for them.
While creating your pillar page’s content, remember to provide a general overview and dive more deeply into your subtopics. After all, you don’t want to overwhelm your website’s visitors with too much information straight off the bat!
Tip: For your pillar page, follow these three key steps: set the stage for the idea, highlight its importance and direct users to the cluster’s subtopics. Afterwards, you can move on to creating your cluster content.
5. Optimize for SEO
Once you’re done crafting quality content for your pillar page and content clusters, you need to optimize key on-page areas of your subtopic pages with the specific keyword you want to rank for. These areas include the following: page title, sub-headings, the content itself, page URL (or slug), and meta title and meta description.
For those who want to take their content cluster strategy to the next level, you can build external backlinks to your cluster topics. From guest posts to email outreach, backlinks are an amazing SEO tactic for boosting your pillar page and subtopics altogether!
6. Monitor & Update
Once your content cluster is live on your website, the hard work doesn’t end there. Even though the bulk of the work is complete, you should still make it a regular habit to monitor and track the performance of your pillar page and its respective subtopics. You can use key indicators, like page views, bounce rate, time spent on each page, and click data, to see how your pages are doing,
Make sure to update the content accordingly. Trends are always changing and certain information can become inaccurate over time. For these reasons, it’s absolutely vital to keep your content up-to-date so it remains relevant and factually accurate, while adhering to your topical map’s main focus and content structure.
Common Topic Cluster Mistakes to Avoid
If you’ve made it this far, you should feel proud of yourself because we’re almost at the finish line! To hone your content cluster strategy to perfection, make sure to avoid the following common mistakes:
- Content Flooding: In order to make your content cluster shine, you need to avoid content flooding, which occurs when an influx of blogs target the same keyword, leading to keyword cannibalization. Instead, utilize unique search queries for your cluster page content.
- Inadequate Interlinking: Interlinking organizes your content clusters and helps search engines crawl them, which improves search rankings and traffic. If you want to steer clear of inadequate interlinking or “content siloing”, remember to add a sufficient number of links to your content clusters.
- Cluster Pages Don’t Support the Pillar Topic: It’s important to note that your cluster page’s topic and keywords shouldn’t be irrelevant to your pillar content. Otherwise, it can violate the pillar-content relations and Google might not view your content as being relevant or in-depth.
- Not Promoting Your Offerings: Finally, another common mistake is when your content clusters don’t align with your products/services. In the end, this will lead your customer to an ultimate dead end, without offering them with any value that they can take away from your business.
Wrapping Up
A content cluster strategy is essential for every brand’s website. It offers several advantages for your business, including establishing your topical authority, improving SEO rankings, and driving meaningful engagement with your audience.
Content clusters not only help organize content in a way that is both user- and search engine-friendly but also foster a deeper connection with your audience through addressing their specific needs and interests. By understanding the structure and benefits of content clusters, you can ensure your website remains a valuable resource for users and a recognized authority in your industry.
Start incorporating content clusters into your digital marketing efforts today to see your website reach new heights in search rankings and user engagement!
At TechWyse Internet Marketing, we offer superior Content Marketing Services that can take your business to the top! Our fully certified team also specializes in SEO, Social Media Management, Paid Media, and more. To get started, call 866-208-3095 or contact us here.
