Businesses around the world are looking forward to bring more visibility and traffic to their websites. That is possible only with the help of good quality content and SEO friendly website design. People use varied strategies and ideas for the SEO of their websites that are eventually said to rank up the website higher on the search engines. The search engine updates are so frequent that the new update is already released with a flip of a hat before you make some changes to the earlier one. The latest addition and release from search engines talk about having “Topic Clusters” in the content of the website design.
Just like for making a sweet dish, you require all the ingredients to mix up with. Similarly, topic clusters are made up of inter-related topics that are inter-linked on the website page. These clusters are taking up blogging and SEO arena by strong purpose and giving great output. Topic clusters are highly important for the SEO of your website and if technically done well, can bring marvellous results to your websites helping them rank on the top pages of the search engines.
If you are looking for SEO success, then accommodating to the needs of the Topic Clusters is highly important. Since search engines, today favour the topic-based content, most marketers and technical SEO teams are now shifting their focus to create content that is based on the Cluster model.
For creating a content cluster, you need to have a central page that has the central topic and then you have several inter-linked pages that are connected to the main page and the main topic.
If you are thinking of updating your strategy today that was released a week back, you might as well be in for a surprise. Since Google makes changes to its algorithm just every single day hence it is highly important to place your content accordingly. There are almost 2-3 major updates released by search engines in one single year. The algorithms have evolved over a period of time where they can now understand complex search queries and the relevant searches made. It has become necessary for technical SEO and content marketers to get adapted to these newer updates. The faster they get updated to, it is better for the ranking of their websites.
The two major updates with regards to content clusters, by Google, had been of Hummingbird update in 2013 and RankBrain that was launched in 2015. Search engines, no more concentrate on the keyword-based content, they are more focused on topic-based content, that is the key take away for major companies planning for SEO.
For getting a massive search engine success, you need to create a content cluster that will help search engines understand your website and what it has to offer. The website needs to be restructured so that interlinks can be built around different topics. The best idea is to create a piece of content built around a core topic and eventually branching it out.
The technical search engine optimization of your website hovers around the idea of having inter-connected and relevant topics. Forming a content strategy with a content cluster in mind gives relevant results because that determines the scope of the topic and makes your website search engine loveable, so how do you go about it?
Good Quality Content – Search engines love original and quality content, apart from that, they have turned their heads towards topic-relevant content. It means content clusters are the future if you are looking to have enormous visibility to your web pages.
It is important to create content that gives value to the customer. Five elements to remember while creating a content cluster is to ensure that the content is relevant, original, educational, engaging and accurate.
Focus on the relevant topic – Clusters are an inter-woven piece of contents together, hence, you have to do some analysis from the existing content on your website and select the ones that you feel are right for the topic clusters. You will have to do some keyword research that is apt for the content.
Building a pillar post – Pillar post is the main topic for the entire group of the content cluster. Choose a topic that is broad in nature which can have several other content branches under it. One topic may have several content posts related, the idea is to maintain the relevancy of the posts.
Connecting the cluster contents – Since, now you have a number of topics that are directly connected to the main topic. The next step is to link the posts to each other. You already have one umbrella, that is the pillar post and now you have built the connections. Tie all the contents together and link it with the pillar post.
Once you do this, you have achieved your goal of telling the search engines that you are an expert on the topic and your website is full of content. The inter-connected content boosts the domain authority and gives the best results for SEO in the future.
The idea of a content cluster is truly beneficial for businesses doing rigorous content marketing. Businesses having multiple services, can try grouping each content link with another one to create their own cluster group.