While creating highly valuable content and using the right keywords is important, how you organize your site also matters. Google no longer just looks at keywords and web pages when ranking articles. It searches for topics, synonyms, and answers to questions that users in your niche often ask.
Therefore, you need to show Google that your site is relevant to a certain niche. This makes it an authority in your niche. To do that, you should organize your content in Pillar pages and subject clusters. While this takes time, it can help show topical authority.
What is Topic Clustering?
Topic clustering involves grouping articles and pages in the same niche on one page. The contents of a topic cluster cover a bigger subject while adding more nuances, details, and specificity. The topic clusters seek to answer users’ questions on a subject matter in that niche.
When doing topic clustering, you should build the subtopics around a pillar content. The pillar page is usually built around a bigger subject and targets general keywords in the industry with a higher search volume. To complement your SEO strategy, you might consider boosting Spotify followers to increase your social proof and attract more attention.
The topic clusters tackle the subtopics under the pillar content. The keywords under the topic cluster often have a lower search volume and less competition. However, they need to have a semantic relationship with the main topic.
Topic clusters built around pillar topic
Benefits of Topic Clusters
Here are some great reasons for topic clustering:
Build Topical Authority
Topic clustering is an important SEO strategy. The more articles on a specific topic you create content on, the more topical authority you get. This, in turn, increases the number of keywords that you can rank for. Therefore, you will meet Google’s cranking criteria of EAT(Expertise, Authoritativeness, and TrustWorthiness).
Gain the Reader’s Trust
When you have topical authority on a subject, it becomes easier to gain the reader’s trust. This will, in turn, help attract and bring more engagement.
Improve Site Structure
Have you ever visited a site that you found difficult to navigate around? That can be frustrating, and you probably left without finding the information you were searching for. With topic clustering, you can keep your site well-organized for users. Since you will be linking to and from the pillar, it helps readers to find related content easily.
Better User Experience
When people visit your site from any channel, you want them to remain there. When you create topic clusters, you can direct visitors to pages with more useful information. This improves user experience and provides you with a good opportunity to direct your visitors to the right user channel.
How To Do Topic Clustering
Here are the steps you should follow in topic clustering:
Audit Your Site
There are many benefits of site audit. Before you create clusters for a site, you will need to create a list of the topics that already exist on the site. This can help you to determine the pillar content that your site is already focusing on. This can be your starting point for creating thematic clusters for the pillar topics.
For any topic that you list, you should determine if there are articles that can be categorized under that cluster. When doing the site audit, check the topics already covered in the cluster and the length of those articles.
Choose a Core Topic
The next step in topic clustering should be to choose the topics around which you will build clusters. If your site already has a lot of detailed articles on a certain subtopic, you can make this to be the pillar page of your site. You may also note that the topic that you want to make your pillar topic doesn’t have a lot of articles under it. In that case, you will need to choose another article as the pillar content.
Choose the topic for your cluster
When considering the topic for your pillar content, there are several factors you need to consider. These are:
- Relevance to your site
- Topics performing well on the site
- Topics that your audience is interested in
- Your competitor’s topics
Ensure that the topic is broad enough to enable you to cover several topics. However, it should be too broad to the point where the clusters lose focus.
Do Keyword Research
The next step will be to determine the keywords you are trying to rank for. You should analyze these keywords to determine if they are worth going after. To do that, check the search intent, search volumes, and keyword difficulty. If your goal is to make money, choose a pillar content keyword that is a money keyword. You can learn more about how to use keyword research for content marketing.
Do keyword research for your topic clusters
Map Your Current Topic
In this step, check your content map, considering all articles, and determine the thematic cluster in which each article falls. A single blog post can fall under multiple thematic clusters. On the other hand, the shorter articles and blogs could only have enough content for a single cluster.
Use hyperlinks to connect topics in the same clusters. This will also help users to navigate around your site easily. It also makes it easier for search engines like Google to find related content on the site.
Fill Gap in Content
You might have noticed some relevant keywords that aren’t covered in your thematic clusters. You will not need to create short-form blogs and articles on the keywords not covered in your site. You can follow the steps in competitor keyword analysis to identify content gaps that you can fill.
Optimise Content
Now that you have done topic clustering, you will need to optimize the content both for human beings and search engines. This means that even as you organize your site around certain clusters and interlink them, you will need to ensure that it is easy for users to read your content.
You should structure your content in a readable and intuitive way. Also, ensure that your content provides users with the solutions they are looking for. It should address the audience’s pain points so that it enables them to solve their problems.
Final Thoughts
Topic clustering is an important part of SEO. Since you will be creating content around certain keywords, you can easily meet the reader’s search intent. This will encourage your readers to convert. Besides, it will also help you rank better on the search engines.
While deciding content clusters doesn’t have to be complicated, you need to be careful so that you can choose topics that are useful for your visitors. By following this guide, it should be easy for you to create topic clusters.
