Imagine this: a potential customer lands on your website, excited to learn more about your products or services, and buy! They navigate through many sections on different pages, only to leave in frustration, unable to find the information they are looking for.
This situation happens way too often on many websites, highlighting the need for a solid content strategy.
Topic clusters (also known as content hubs) are a smart way to group related content around a central theme, boosting your traffic and improving your site’s visibility.
In this guide, we’ll show you how topic clusters can enhance SEO, improve user experience, and generate more qualified leads. Ready to streamline your content and grow your business? Keep reading!
What are topic clusters and why do they matter for users and search engines?
As we mentioned, topic clusters are a strategic way of organizing website content that focuses on a core topic and its related subtopics. Some of the benefits of implementing this strategy are the following:
- Builds the Topic Authority needed in your market, directly boosting your Google rankings.
- Increases your site’s authority by efficiently distributing Site Authority, which ensures that all important pages on your site keep relevance.
- Helps search engines better understand the structure of your website, which ensures your page is shown to the right target audience. This helps increase visibility for your content and website, driving more targeted traffic.
- Improves user navigation, making it easy for visitors to find essential information, leading to better experiences and higher conversions.
How does it all work, then? The core of the strategy, the pillar page, links to each of the subtopics (or content clusters), and, in turn, these subtopics also link to the pillar page. Here’s a visual representation of what this looks like:
Now, let’s see a practical example. Imagine you own a company called “EcoHome” that sells sustainable home products.
You want to become an authority on the subject, so you want to develop the topic of “Sustainable Home Living”. Here’s what a pillar page together with its supporting content would look like:
Topic clusters are really important, then, because they establish a website’s authority on specific subjects.
Google’s goal is to rank content that reflects Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), and expanding upon a topic is a direct way to highlight these traits.
It might be helpful to think of this strategy as a roadmap for your audience: it guides them through a landscape of interconnected topics that provide a whole panorama of a single theme.
As search engines evolve, topic clusters play a key role in signaling your site’s relevance and expertise, ultimately boosting your visibility in search results.
The power of pillar pages: your content SEO foundation
We’ve already talked about how topic clusters work, and what they are helpful for. But there are a few terms we haven’t defined yet: pillar pages and supporting content.
The pillar page is the heart of the topic cluster strategy: it serves as the resource that will allow you to expand on this wide-ranging topic.
Following up on the earlier example we provided, your pillar page for the EcoHome website would be something like “Your ultimate guide to sustainable home living”, an article that will allow you to cover a broad range of subtopics related to sustainable living and promote your eco-friendly home products.
You don’t have to delve too deep into these subtopics: the supporting content you’ll create for your topic cluster strategy will allow you to do just that.
As we saw in the earlier diagram, some examples of supporting content for this topic include articles such as “How to Create a Sustainable Garden: Tips for Beginners” or “10 Energy-Efficient Appliances for Your Home”.
In this way, readers interested in this topic can find all they need on your pillar page, as they’ll have the “preview” of each supporting topic.
How do I create a topic cluster strategy?
Now, we’ll give you a practical way of creating your topic clusters. Once you get the gist of the process, you’ll be able to adapt it to your niche and drive more organic traffic to your website.
Step 1: Identify core topics
Many people jump straight into keyword research, pulling keywords without a clear strategy.
However, to truly maximize your SEO efforts, we recommend being more strategic. Start by auditing the existing content on your website and grouping it by topic.
This step not only helps you understand what you already have but also reveals gaps and opportunities for improvement.
There are many tools you can use to do it, but we recommend taking the time to do it by hand first so you can get a better grasp of your content landscape.
Once you’ve grouped all of the content you have on your page, it’s time to find new topic clusters. We recommend following these three steps:
- Think about all the services or products you provide. What do you want to highlight?
- Ask yourself: What are the primary needs of your potential customers that you aim to address? What might they be searching for in different stages of their customer journey?
- Take a look at what your competitors are doing: you will certainly find useful information in the kind of content they publish.
Once you’ve done this, you will have a list of what topics to develop in your blog, and you can move on to the next step.
Step 2: Perform keyword research
You might use whatever keyword management system you like to do keyword research, but we’d like to give you an easy, completely free-to-access way to find the keywords you need.
Google’s Autocomplete and People also ask features are a great way to find keywords to target in your topic clusters strategy.
Let’s return to our earlier example, EcoHome’s “sustainable home living” pillar page. Here are some topics that Google Autocomplete suggests for the topic:
Now we have a full list of keywords, that includes:
- What is sustainable living
- Most used sustainable solutions in housing
- Eco friendly
- Materials eco friendly
- How to make our home more eco friendly
- Eco friendly project
- Affordable housing around the world
- Archdaily sustainability
What about People also ask? Well, if we scroll to the bottom of the “sustainable home living” search results page, we find the following keywords:
Of course, it would be best to check for the keywords’ search volume in a keyword management system such as Semrush or Ahrefs. But for now, you have plenty of information to work with.
Step 3: Develop pillar pages
The first question you have to ask yourself when developing a pillar page is the following: if my client stumbled onto this content, would it answer all of the doubts they might have about the topic?
From our earlier keyword research, it seems evident that EcoHome’s potential customers are looking for a sustainable home guide.
This guide could cover everything from earlier stages of the process (“sustainable home building” or how to build a sustainable home) to optimizing or renovating a home to be more sustainable (“Green living home and garden”, “sustainable house design” or “sustainable house features”).
Our pillar page, as established earlier, could be “The Ultimate Guide to Sustainable Home Living” and include all of the subtopics we’ve researched.
But be careful: before you start writing, you should create a structure to outline these relevant subtopics and how you will link them. These are some of our tips for writing a pillar page:
- Start by sketching out a simple structure for your subtopics using header tags like H2 and H3. No need to get fancy here; this is just to help you visualize how your article will flow.
- Next, write a catchy introduction that sets the stage for your main topics and makes it clear why this pillar page is valuable for readers.
- Then, you have to dive into each key subtopic. Think of these sections as mini-guides that cover the essentials without going into too much detail, as you’ll save that for your supporting content later on.
- Optimize your headers! Craft engaging and descriptive titles for each section that clearly convey what readers can expect. And don’t forget to include some relevant keywords where it makes sense.
- Include internal links within the text to guide readers to related content. Just be mindful of your anchor text to ensure it’s relevant and helpful (we’ll dive into this topic later)
Tip: don’t forget to add a table of contents, as this item makes it easier for your readers to navigate your article.
Step 4: Create supporting content
Now you have your pillar page, but it’s time to build a collection of supporting content pieces. Think blog posts, how-to guides, infographics, and even videos that dive deeper into specific subtopics, and that can make up your whole pillar content strategy.
You have to make sure each piece connects back to your pillar page and links to one another where it makes sense. This way, you’ll create a cohesive content ecosystem that keeps your audience engaged and informed.
As we mentioned earlier, you’ll develop each subtopic in detail in your supporting content, as opposed to what you’ll include in your pillar page.
Let’s continue with our sustainable home living theme. If one of your supporting pieces is a how-to guide titled “How to Build a Sustainable Home,” you’ll want to provide a sneak peek into a few key methods for optimizing energy and water usage on the main pillar page.
Perhaps you’ll touch on concepts like using energy-efficient appliances or installing a rainwater harvesting system, giving readers just enough info to spark their interest.
Then, in your detailed how-to guide, you can dig in and explore these ideas further, providing step-by-step instructions and practical tips.
You should approach each one of your subtopics in this way; each page should address one topic and target a specific set of keywords.
Just in case, we recommend establishing a keyword mapping document so as not to lose track of the keywords you use, and avoid keyword cannibalization.
Step 5: Establish internal links
An extremely important part of this strategy is internal linking, which involves hyperlinking related content within your own website.
There are two main reasons why you absolutely cannot forget about implementing links between your pages:
- It enhances navigation, as internal links guide users through this network of content you’ve developed, which increases the amount of time they spend on your site;
- As search engines use internal links to crawl websites and determine the relevance of pages, a good internal linking strategy helps Google understand the relationship between the content.
Here are some of the best practices you should follow when establishing links:
- Use descriptive anchor text: make sure that the text that is used for links is descriptive and relevant to the content it leads to.
- Link strategically: include links to cluster pages within the pillar page, and vice versa. You also should link to related cluster pages to create a more cohesive network of content.
- Avoid overlinking: internal linking is good for your site, but overdoing can be counterproductive. You should aim for a balanced approach and think about your customer’s journey, and what type of linking strategy would be useful for what they’re looking for.
Common mistakes to avoid when drawing up a topic cluster strategy
When looking for information on the best practices for creating topic clusters on the internet, chances are you might stumble upon old, unreliable strategies that will do no good to your website’s SEO strategy.
That’s why in this section we will list a few mistakes that, unfortunately, are frequent among those marketers trying to implement pillar page/topic cluster strategies:
1. Poor topic selection
Choosing topics that are either too broad or too niche can go against your topic cluster’s effectiveness.
Considering this, you might wanna go for themes that spark clear interest among your audience and have enough related subtopics to support multiple cluster pages.
2. Neglecting SEO basics
It’s very likely that by now, you are completely focused on topic clusters, with a million ideas running through your head.
But don’t forget the fundamentals of SEO! If you skip out on optimizing your titles, meta descriptions, and headings, you risk losing visibility in search results.
3. Inconsistent content quality
Creating content without thinking about what your audience is actually searching for can lead to many problems, such as a high bounce rate and zero traffic.
Our advice is to make sure to do your research: dig into user intent and weave that insight into your content strategy to better cater to their needs.
5. Overlooking internal linking opportunities
While. at this point in the article, you should understand that internal linking is key, it’s easy to overlook those golden linking opportunities between your clusters and the pillar page. Always make it a point to include relevant links!
Are you ready to unlock your SEO potential with topic clusters?
By embracing topic clusters, you’ll not only keep your audience engaged but also tell search engines that your site is an authoritative place to go for specific topics.
If you want to implement this strategy, generate more qualified traffic, and boost your business results, contact us at Bultein.
