How To Boost Your SEO With Content Cluster Strategy

Feb 12

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How To Boost Your SEO With Content Cluster Strategy

Create content that helps you establish yourself as a thought leader, brings relevant traffic to your website and most importantly, is helpful to your clients and customers.

What are Content or Topic Clusters?

Have you got a content strategy for your website or do you randomly post things on an irregular basis? I think we all start producing content in a hectic, non-strategic way. We, small business owners, know that that we should share our expertise in the form of blog posts but we do it sporadically and without any real concept.

The Cluster Content Framework is a great way to produce content as it does not only improve your SEO efforts to get you to the top of the front page in Google for relevant keywords to your brand, but it also helps you to come up with content ideas regularly and never to run out of things to write. Without content clusters, there’s a good chance that your SEO content creation efforts involve shooting in the dark and hoping something will stick.

If you don’t have a content strategy in place, or only create content as and when the mood strikes, or don’t know what you’re going to write until you sit down to do it, then your content structure will look all over the place. A bit of personal here, something interesting you read there, and some fun content in the middle. Without a real concept that holds the various content pieces together, it will be very hard to see a pattern of content on your site and if it’s hard to see a pattern, Google will find it difficult to determine how much authority you have on each topic.

The idea of the Cluster Content Framework is that you group your content around the key topics your target audience is interested in. This structure makes the hierarchical relationship between pages more visible and helps you build authority on topics that are important and relevant to your brand. If you have a structure of connected pages on the same topic, all linking back to your pillar page, you'll see ranking uplifts on a topic level, rather than a page or individual post level.

This is a little comparison of how a website looks to your audience (and Google) with and without clusters:

How does it improve SEO?

In the diagram below, you can see that there are three main components:

Pillar page — a broad, comprehensive piece of content that serves as the “hub” of your cluster. Pillar content is also called "evergreen” content which implies that it will continually stay relevant “fresh” for readers over a long period of time. You will need to look at it regularly to keep it relevant and fresh but if you do, it will bring traffic throughout the lifetime of your blog or website.
Cluster content — any piece of content internally linked to and from a cluster’s pillar page. It can be any format: blog posts, case studies, infographics, the key is to host them on your site and link them to the Pillar page they belong to.
Internal links — the glue that holds your clusters together

When they’re working together in a Cluster Content Framework, these three components allow you to create and manage an impeccably organised and high-quality collection of content that is useful to your clients and customers and is super easy for Google to crawl your site.

Those internal hyperlinks in particular, are what indicate to Google that there is a relationship between all the linked content. And when all of that linked content boasts high-quality, relevant content, it demonstrates Google your expertise on a particular topic. That kind of authority and quality is what gives you a boost in search rankings and rocket you to the top searches on Google for keywords that are relevant to your brand.

How to Create a Content Cluster Strategy?

Content Goals & Keyword Research

Before you write any content, you should perform a thorough analysis of your business goals and conduct keyword research to align with these goals.

What are you trying to accomplish with a more targeted SEO content strategy?
Are there specific keywords or service areas you want to focus on more than others?

Once you’ve established those goals, you have a solid foundation to start our content audit and build out our clusters.

1. Existing Content Audit

If you’ve already written content previously, you will need to go through every piece and see how it fits in your content strategy. During this existing content audit, you should group all existing blog content into key topics. These topics will become your clusters, and any content relating to a specific topic becomes the topic’s cluster content.

2. Come Up With Your Key Topics

If you don’t have any existing content yet, think about the key topics that ara:

Relevant to your clients and customers
You have authority on.

Map out five to ten core problems that your buyer persona has. Use surveys, run interviews, and do some secondary research within online communities as needed to gather the data.

Choose 3-5 key topics you’ll group your audience under. If you have a broader range of topics you’d like to cover, you can but my advice is to start small, build out a few key strong topics with lots of relevant articles on them and then move on building others. You will have to post content regularly so try not to take on too much, to begin with, to avoid burnout.

3. Establish Pillar Pages

Now that we have identified the cluster topics, the next step is to designate pilla page hat will connect all the content within a cluster together.

To recap, a pillar page is essentially the cornerstone or hub of a cluster, it’s a long piece of evergreen content that functions as the map that connects all other content in the cluster. Unlike the rest of your cluster content, a pillar page is much broader in scope so that it can link to and touch on every facet of the cluster.

Sometimes you might need to create a pillar page from scratch, but sometimes you can revamp an existing article in your cluster that already possesses some of these “broader” qualities.

4. Internal Linking

This is a very important part of your cluster strategy. With your clusters and pillar pages established, it’s now time to put link all the content together with internal hyperlinks. All cluster content should include a link to the pillar page, and the pillar page should include links to all the cluster content. With links go both ways, Google’s algorithm evaluates the authority and quality of a page’s content is through links — both internal linking on your site and external linking to/from other sites (also known as backlinks). So this part of the process is essentially where the magic happens.

5. Maintenance of content clusters

As I mentioned previously, Pillar content is evergreen content so it should stay relevant. To maintan relevancy, you’ll need to revisit it from time to time, to make sure everything that it includes is still relevant.

You’ll be adding new pieces of Cluster content regularly so make sure you add a few sentences in your Pillar Content with links back to the Cluster and vice versa.

Is it right for your business?

If you are a service-based business, it’s definitely right for your business. Anyone and everyone who sells some sort of a service needs to establish themselves as an authority on a subject not only to rank high on Google make themselves easily found, but to establish trust with their audience as well.

TL, DR

Cluster Content Framework is the easiest and most strategic way to:

Create relevant content consistently,
Improve your SEO and rank highly on Google on keywords that are important to your brand,
Build authority on topics that are most relevant to your target audience.

How to do it:

Group each of the problems into broad topic areas. These broad topic ideas will be the basis of your pillar content.
Build out each of the core topics with subtopics using keyword research.
Map out content ideas that align with each of the core topics and corresponding subtopics.
Validate each idea with industry and competitive research.
Create pillar content first
Create cluster content pieces and link each of them back to your pillar content
Measure the impact, and refine.

Need help with your Cluster Content strategy? Download my free template from here.