Mastering Topic Clustering: A Proven Strategy for Effective Content and SEO

The Aspect of Topic Cluster in SEO

As 2019 concludes, digital marketers face a new challenge: having high-quality, SEO-friendly content isn’t enough to improve rankings, traffic, and conversions. It's time to refine a strategy that has been known for a few years but hasn't been widely implemented.

What Exactly is a Topic Cluster?

A topic cluster is a collection of interrelated pages on your website. These pages are centered around a core piece of content that addresses a broad topic, with each page focusing more narrowly on a subtopic.

A topic cluster in SEO consists of:

Pillar content with a high search volume keyword

Several related content pieces, each with a more specialized, lower search volume keyword

Links between pillar content and related content pages

Why Stress Over a Pillar Page Strategy?

When executed correctly, topic clusters can significantly boost your website’s search results, organic traffic, and conversion rates. Each cluster enhances your content marketing efforts, helping you gain more authority with your audience.

Given the difficulty of winning with a single keyword today, clusters allow you to target entire themes and improve the rankings of related pages simultaneously. For Google, it’s about the semantic relationship between these pages, pushing the entire topic higher in search results.

Topic clusters make it easier for readers to find your content, while Google’s bots can quickly discover and rank all related articles. The optimal outcome is that your pillar content ranks higher for competitive short-tail keywords, while your sub-content ranks better for long-tail keywords. This approach earns you traffic for both highly targeted phrases and those with lower search volumes, boosting your credibility with both users and search engines.

Implementing a Topic Cluster Approach

To implement a topic cluster strategy, you’ll need to:

Identify content topics

Generate subtopics

Assess and organize your current material

Prioritize content quality over quantity, avoiding duplicate content that confuses users and search engines

Selecting the Appropriate Topic and Keywords for Your Cluster

Adding topic clusters to your website is straightforward. Focus on the topic and the appropriate keywords for each piece of content within it.

Select a Topic

Choose topics relevant to your business and audience, such as a product you offer, the benefits your customers receive, the challenges you help them solve, or the values you want to be associated with. Understanding user intent will help you select the right core topic for your cluster. The topic should be broad enough to warrant several sub-content pieces and influence your business development. Use spreadsheets or mind maps to brainstorm and organize all topics and subtopics for approval.

Select Keywords

Topic clusters aim to create multiple content pieces centered around one theme keyword. You'll need one main keyword for the pillar article and various related phrases for supplemental content.

Consider the complexity and search volume of keywords. A pillar article should target a broad keyword with medium to high difficulty and large search traffic, while subtopics should target low search volume keywords, including those from queries and long-tail searches.

Spying on competitors can help you identify suitable keywords for your cluster, revealing keywords you might have missed and allowing you to surpass competitors by addressing overlooked terms.

Formulating the Topic Cluster

Once you've identified a core keyword for a pillar article and grouped related keywords for subtopics, your topic cluster should look like this:

Write all the cluster pages, ensuring each page offers something unique and avoids duplicating content covered on other cluster pages.

Follow best practices for epic content development, including long-reads, storytelling, useful and respectful facts, and engaging visuals.

Create subtopic pages first to ensure your main content piece isn't duplicated.

The pillar page should provide an overview of the broad topic, typically being very extensive (3,000+ words) without delving into each aspect in detail. It should include internal links to all subtopic pages.

A pillar page can be structured as a comprehensive blog post or an ultimate guide that thoroughly covers your topic. Another strategy is to have pillar content on your main domain and supporting pieces on your blog.

For interlinking:

Link the pillar page to all supporting articles.

Link each supporting article back to the pillar page.

Link all relevant supporting articles to each other.

This makes it easier for Google spiders to identify and index the topic cluster, giving your pillar page additional SEO power.

Measuring the Results

Analyzing the success of your topic clusters justifies further investment in the strategy and enhances your marketing efforts. However, measuring the impact of an entire cluster on traffic and organic search results can be challenging since most tools measure individual pages rather than large groups of content. Additionally, other factors influencing website data, such as speed improvements or content updates, can affect traffic.

Using Google Analytics:

Create a new Content Grouping for your topic cluster and add all related URLs with a rule for each URL.

Go to Site Content > All Pages and filter by groups to check the overall cluster performance.

Add the Organic Traffic segment and any other desired metrics to observe associated changes.

Create a custom segment in Sequences, select your cluster, and change the Sequence Start option to “Any user interaction” to understand audience interaction with the topic cluster on your website.

Evaluate the performance of each pillar page independently, especially if published on a root domain, as it may have a separate Google Analytics account.

Final Considerations

Topic clusters can be the magic button that marketers need to increase organic traffic and rankings. This approach organizes content so users and search engines can navigate it easily, focuses on content quality with a well-structured keyword strategy, and enhances SEO efforts for better results. Consider topic clusters an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise with each piece of content you create.