Topic Cluster Content Strategy
The topic cluster content strategy is a method of organizing your website's content around a set of core topics, which are relevant to your business, niche or industry. This approach involves creating a hub of content around each core topic, which can include blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and other types of content.
The goal of this strategy is to signal to search engines that your site is an authoritative source of information on these core topics, which can lead to higher search engine rankings, and ultimately more traffic and leads to your website.
What Is A Topic Cluster
A topic cluster is many pieces of content grouped together by a shared topic and related subtopics, usually broken into smaller sub sections of the main topic in an effort to provide complete coverage to the end user. Providing searchers the answers to their questions naturally and providing links to more detailed information on sub topics.
How To Create A Topic Cluster
- Identify your core topics: Choose a set of 5-10 broad topics that are relevant to your business, niche or industry. These should be topics that your target audience is interested in and that you can create multiple pieces of content around.
- Create pillar pages: A pillar page is a comprehensive, long-form piece of content that provides an overview of a core topic. Each pillar page should cover a broad topic and link to other more specific pieces of content on that topic. These pages should be optimized for your core topic and should be designed to rank well in search results.
- Create cluster content: Create more specific, targeted pieces of content that are related to your core topics. Each piece of cluster content should cover a sub-topic related to your core topic and should link back to the corresponding pillar page. The cluster content should also link to other related pieces of content within the same cluster.
- Optimize for search: Each piece of content within a cluster should be optimized for search engines, with keyword-rich titles, content, and tags. The pillar page and cluster content should also be interlinked, which helps search engines to understand the relationship between the content pieces and to rank them accordingly.
Topic Cluster Content Strategy FAQs
What is the primary purpose of a topic cluster content strategy?
The primary purpose of a topic cluster content strategy is to sends signals to the search engines that your content is what people want and should be placed higher in the rankings. To achieve this you provide comprehensive coverage on your topic and sub-topics.
What are the main componenets of a topic cluster content strategy?
- A Pillar Page - this is the page you want traffic to.
- The Cluster (Supporting Pages) - these pages covers sub-topics of the pillar page in more detail.
- Internal Linking - having your cluster pages link back to the pillar page and other cluster pages.
What are examples of topic cluster content strategy?
Let's say you write a blog about dieting, so you write a pillar page about dieting in general which probably has information on various kinds of diets (vegan, raw, low carb). Now you can create a cluster by writing about low carb diet recipes, low carb diet health concerns, low carb diet support groups and on and on. Once you've covered that topic in depth you have a cluster. Hopefully you've used a proper link strategy and that cluster is working towards ranking your pillar page.