Using Topic Clusters to Boost Your SEO Strategy
Search engines are clever – they don’t just take keywords into account when crawling your website’s content. Building up a semantic field of related terms and topics alongside your main keywords will further reinforce to search engines that your site is a valuable destination for users. These days, the best SEO marketing strategies are going one step further and implementing the topic cluster model to organise website content and rank higher on the SERP. In this article we will bring you up to date on topic clusters, and explain how they can do some heavy lifting for your content marketing plan!
What are topic clusters and how are they structured?
Think of topic clusters as a family. A family of pages on your website with a semantic relationship to each other. At the heart of the family is the pillar page, which is the more general topic that the cluster content is structured around. The pillar page tends to target the higher ranking short tail keywords that may prove trickier to rank for, whereas the topic clusters will focus on more specific areas within the chosen topic that may not have as much competition.
You may find there may already be existing content on your website that is a perfect candidate for the pillar page! Just make sure that you pick one after doing some research into what your target audience are searching for. The topic cluster model is intent-based, after all. For example, if your website is about all things Poodles, a useful pillar page might be ‘Buying A Poodle – What You Need To Know’. From this, you can perform keyword research to choose subcategories for your topic clusters. SEMrush & Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer are both useful for cluster ideas, along with Google’s autocomplete feature. For our example, options could include ‘Back To The Office: Is My Job Suitable For A Poodle?’ and ‘The Rising Costs Of Poodle Puppies During Lockdown’.
Although topic clusters need to be varied enough to rank in their own right, the clue’s in the name: there needs to be a theme running through them. If done correctly, Google will understand your content hierarchy and reward you accordingly. Remember, it is also important to have internal links from topic clusters back to the pillar page to underline this structure.
How longer tail keywords help your domain authority
Search engines love websites full of rich, relevant and interesting content. Rather than one page that tries to tick every box, you will see much greater results from building up a wealth of related pages. This will communicate to Google that you are a valuable resource on your chosen topic and will grant your website topical authority, ultimately increasing your keyword rankings.
As we mentioned earlier, the keywords best suited to topic clusters tend to be longer and more specific, and are referred to as long tail keywords. The thinking behind this strategy is that the long tail keyword ‘rising costs of poodle puppies during lockdown’ would be easier to rank for on the SERP than the more popular ‘buying a poodle’. The positive performance of these semantically linked pages will then lend a helping hand to your pillar page.
Over time, the topical authority that you gain from cluster pages will translate into much coveted domain authority! A higher domain authority score is not directly considered by search engines, but you can be sure of the fact that it is an extremely accurate indicator of how your website will perform. This is especially valuable for small or recently formed businesses that currently have low domain authority and are looking to build their online presence.
A long-term but buildable content strategy
Remember, implementing topic clusters is a long-term strategy. It will take time and resources to build up a bank of related content, but huge results are achievable from a topic cluster model irrespective of the size of your business. The great news is that once search engines like Google recognise how knowledgeable and authoritative your website is on your desired subject, you will see results on the SERP.
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