A topic cluster is basically a group of interlinked web pages or articles based on a particular topic described by getting health articles. It improves the visibility of content in the search engine.
To survive in the competitive digital landscape, businesses need to focus on their content strategies today, more than ever before.
The main component of your production of content needs to be relevant. According to PRnewswire, 78% of consumers say that relevant content raises their level of intention to buy. Your content needs to be relevant to your brand, your consumers, and most of all, appealing to Google.
To accomplish all this, familiarize yourself with topic clusters and find out ways and means to boost your content marketing.
1) Create Keyword-Focused Content
A keyword that focuses on a targeted audience is now rapidly changing. This is because of the way how people are currently looking for information. AS per the long-tail keyword study by Ahrefs, while searching online, approximately 64% of users write a keyword phrase that contains four & five words.
This helps them to narrow down the result but also to find the information they require quickly.
Content marketers and SEO companies use it to create long-tail keywords. The drawback with this practice is that whenever a new piece of material is published, the content competes with your competitors’ as well as with your previous content.
A new approach is called a topic cluster model. It is a technique that shifts focus to a much broader topic that is interlinked to one another rather than targeted long-tail keywords. This model not only organizes your content for your target audience for fast results but also increases the content’s rankings in search engines. As a result, you will get more traffic, leads, and customers.
But keywords are still essential so that users can easily search for your content. However, now you have to be sure that you choose keywords carefully because these are what people will be searching online for information about you.
The best way for you to approach this is by conducting keyword research. The topic clusters for your content marketing strategy are that the content does not compete with each other but rather works for each other through a trickle-down effect on your SEO and interlinking. It will increase your search rankings and help you achieve your business goals.
You just don’t need to do the guesswork about your long-tail keywords related to your pillars. Pillars are web pages that describe any subtopic of your content cluster. By analysing pillars you can exactly find what your potential customers are searching for. For achieving this, you can avail the of the help of some valuable tools and resources.
1. Wordtracker
Wordtracker has a search tool that permits keywords to find out precisely what keywords your competitors are employing. It is so efficient that it works with a single click and builds a list of keywords from any web page.
The below picture explains how simple it is to use Wordtracker.
2. Keyword Planner
Google keyword planner helps you to search for phrases and words which are associated with your products and services. The most applicable keywords for your business will be available through our keyword research tool.
For example, you have a jacket business, and you need some relevant keywords to put in your content. You can easily find them using google keyword planner.
3. Crowd Writer
It is a manual method of finding the keyword phrases and using them in the content. Human resources are involved in it. A machine won’t make the judgment. It follows what you feed. Sometimes an unusual variation could establish great success. Thus, you can get a competitive keyword. Crowd Writer has different resources, and I personally use them for receiving SEO-enriched content.
4. SEMRUSH
SEMRUSH is for searching for a profitable keyword. It is a tool of SEO that performs a keyword search for you. It tracks the strategy that your competitors are employing, also runs an SEO audit for your blog, and also searches for backlinks. It is useful to new and old bloggers alike to optimize and create content to attract the audience.
2) Constructing your content cluster
The problem with the ad-hoc approach (caching content wirelessly) is that Google struggles to find a pattern or identify relationships between your pieces of content. It struggles to make content that appears on the first page of Google.
There is an effective method to solve that problem, by creating content that Google loves, including long-tail keywords, keeping it simple and unique. At the same time, build a library of content that is beneficial to the audience you target. Once you selected the topic, now you can move forward to focus on your content cluster 5-10 would be sufficient.
Answering the public is a way to move forward. It generates a list of most often questions regarding the topic you can select from the queries. When your content clusters are complete, you have to ensure that you link them to the pillar page as well as to each other. While you are link-building your content, it is essential to make two-way links. You should also create pillar page links that operate as content clusters.
Do mention that pillar pages cover the focus topic broadly to be reasonable and logical to connect the entire content cluster linking to it. The content cluster created or optimized has to go in-depth in only one area referred to on the pillar page. For instance, when you have a pillar page on search engine optimization, a cluster content page provide detail regarding ways to optimize your site architecture for search engines.
The main thing is to see your content assets as the topics on which you want your business to compete, instead of distinct keywords. Still, there is a role for keywords in your entire strategy, but they are now a unifying force for your keyword strategy.
3) Topic Clusters Improve the Experience for Both Search Engines and Readers
Content marketing strategy aims to offer original content which assists particular readers. Topic clusters certainly help you to accomplish this by providing an appropriate way to connect with your readers with the content they dearly desire.
Topic clusters enhance your search engine results as well as organic traffic. They create ways for search engines to easily crawl your site and set up links between your content offerings.
The topic cluster has a unique method of coordinating and interlinking content marketing for the best performance of your search engines and website visitors. It is because a topic cluster includes several pages on a similar topic, and it is more convenient to interlink them which improves SEO. Nowadays, they are rightly called the “future of SEO”, “the next evolution of SEO” and also “the new keywords.”
A topic cluster is content planning that uses 1 “pillar” piece with 5-20 “cluster” pieces. All the cluster pieces link back to the pillar piece.
That is the way different kinds of content function collectively:
- A piece of content called a pillar is an in-depth article or a guide to a broader topic.
- The clusters are additional pieces of articles that are supportive of subtopics and link back to the pillar piece of content.
The greater they did the internal linking; the higher the content rank results in pages. Below is the image of one of the data charts, which shows impressions, raised with interlinked content.
4) Topic Clusters Establish Your Authority and Expertise
Topic clusters show off your knowledge by using your articles as a source of reference. The additional internal links showcase your expertise and further inform your readers.
When you provide a collection of articles on a particular topic, it serves you to establish yourself as an authority in an industry better.
When you extend your content with cluster and pillar articles, you are providing your audience with knowledge, and by doing so, you are establishing your authority like movie Jackets.
Let us have an easy example to illustrate all this.
For instance “Brick & Mortar Store” is an excellent topic, but it is too broad to write all in one article while if consider “different means of marketing” it is surely broad enough to create several different articles on it, such as “setting your marketing budget, tactics, and resources,” and with that consider “things like choosing Instagram influencers, Facebook advertisements, PPC ads, etc.” Simultaneously you can surely write everything about different ways of marketing your brick-and-mortar store.
5) Helps Google Crawlers and Builds Page Authority
The internal linking structures act as signals that explain the architecture of your site. Moreover, Google appreciates when you link your source of information. This helps build authority and hierarchy for your pillar pages and different web pages respectively.
Important role. Therefore, when you link more internal content to connect to a pillar page, the higher it ranks in the search engines.
With the introduction of Google Hummingbird in 2019, the fundamentals of content marketing have more diversity, along with the emphasis on keywords and pages. Now there are pillar pages, content clusters, and subtopics also. A combination of all these can create a greater website experience and high topical authority, and above all, it favors Google.
As a result, search engines are getting smarter; therefore, intelligent content strategies are emphasizing topic clusters instead of keywords. Now topic groups are employed for organizing content and building authority.
When coherent use of topics clustered together, Google acknowledges its’ authority and rewards with a much high listing which is visible in the following search result.
Make Sure You Are Not Left Behind Changing Digital World
Topic clusters are the new revolution of content marketing. In order to survive the rapidly changing digital world, every business has to sharpen its content marketing strategies. You need to interpret how your audience consumes content and find out what they are searching for. Everything you publish all around your distribution channels needs to be beneficial to your audience.
As a beginner, you can follow the below steps to start with a topic cluster approach:
- Pick a topic
- Brainstorm your subtopics
- Research long-tail keywords
- Develop your pillar pages
- Get the pages interlinked with each other
And the most crucial step is to analyse your result and keep improving.
Author Bio:
Stella Lincoln is currently working as a Brand Manager. She loves to devote her time to writing for her audience over different online platforms. She writes excellent content based on authentic facts and figures. She aims to enlighten her readers on all the eminent technological advancements of this era. Stella is an avid reader and travel freak as well