Topic clusters can have a big impact on your website, delivering higher rankings and increased organic traffic if used correctly. Not only does this strategy give Google certain signals about your site’s structure and authority, but users who visit each page should find them informative and easy to navigate. So, keep on reading to find out more about this helpful approach.
What are Topic Clusters?
Topic clusters are a great way of ensuring your website’s content is properly organised. The structure is fairly simple: you should have one “pillar” (or parent) page, which will be the main hub for a general or broad subject. Then, you create multiple other pages which all relate to this and link them back to it (as well as to each other).
Producing several topic clusters will allow you to provide comprehensive coverage of everything relevant to your business. However, it’s important to think about the architecture of your site, too, arranging these topics in a clean and clear way, so that it’s easy for the user to move around.
Why Are They a Useful Strategy?
When you begin your content marketing campaign, you’ll already know to think about keywords and how they will impact what you choose to write about. Using this topic cluster method means that you can create an effective overview of content using both short and long-tail keywords.
Your pillar page will be focused on an overarching phrase, which will likely have a high search volume. You can then optimise your connecting pages for all of the related (and much more specific) keywords, which have smaller search volumes. Usually, it would be difficult for a pillar page to rank highly, but with this tactic, it becomes much easier.
Do They Impact SEO?
Nowadays, many users will search with complex, longer phrases, or even questions, in order to get the exact results they want from their query. That’s why it’s crucial to always match the page content with the search intent for that keyword.
Once you’ve perfected this, Google will see that your smaller pages are giving helpful responses to the user, positioning your site as an expert on the subject. Since all of the pages are linked and fall under the original, overarching term, Google will eventually start to rank you higher for those harder keywords, too.
Of course, this means you need to continuously update and freshen up your content so that it’s always relevant for your visitors.
Finally, there’s no reason to simply start this strategy with new content. Why not go back and organise your site’s current pages with this system in mind, too?
Overall, creating topic clusters means that you will build up credibility, authority and expertise, which are all key things that Google uses to rank websites. To read more helpful blogs on SEO, content and more, check out our other posts, today.