Improve SEO with Topic Clusters
The recent trend in digital marketing and SEO has been to work on content. The focus has been defined largely by the changing behaviour of audiences across the board. Content is becoming the most valued commodity a brand or company can produce. Even big brands that were largely unharmed by changes in technology have to create content in order to maintain their base of customers.
Given the amount of attention on content writing, it is only natural for there to develop new techniques in approaching content creation and marketing. One such approach is referred to as topic clustering.
What Are Topic Clusters?
Imagine you start a blog on writing. Every day, you post an article discussing one aspect of writing. While each content piece individually is of high quality and optimized to get top search rankings, the different blog posts do not necessarily share any contextual link. They are all blog posts on writing, and while some do share similar characteristics, you as a blogger are not creating content that shares a context.
Topic clustering is an approach to content creation that mandates content writers to form a common foundational basis for all the content they create.
Continuing with the same example, consider you have a blog based on the skill of writing. You first create a long article 2-5k words long discussing content writing. The article covers all important aspects of content writing the readers should know. This long-form article can be referred to as the pillar content of your blog.
Around this pillar content, you as a blogger have to next create shorter conventional articles based on specific parts of content writing and link back to the pillar content.
The diagram above is a good example of how a typical topic cluster is formed. Content creators can go beyond seven articles if the pillar content is wide enough to accommodate more topics. It is vital that each article links back to the pillar content.
Why Are Topic Clusters Important For SEO?
Most search engine crawlers indexing websites every second of every day try and identify the kind of content to associate with each page crawled. The benefit of using topic clusters is that it helps search engines to quickly identify the domain on which the website is writing content.
Even without topic clusters, a website can have great content. However, this content lacks context in the eyes of search engines, thus making it more difficult for a website to be categorized by search engines.
Given how the current digital marketing landscape is shaped, a strategic approach to content is vital for helping improving search visibility.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, this article covers the concept of topic clusters and how they can be used to improve the SEO-optimality of a website.
About the Author – Kishan Soni is a highly regarded digital marketer and content writer with years of experience in the field. His current role is that of a content developer at DelhiCourses.in, a prime institute best known for its digital marketing course in Delhi.