How can content clustering enhance your SEO efforts?
Most people focus their SEO efforts on individual keywords, and this strategy can achieve results, but it tends to lead to random articles that are not relevant to your particular audience. Google's helpful content update in 2002 proved that user-first content is given priority. Websites that provide high quality, unique, and valuable content rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
When focusing on individual keywords, the information you provide with a piece of content is very limited. If you want your visitors to return to your site over and over, you need to create information that is beyond a single idea, covering all angles of the topic. This is achieved using content clusters, also sometimes referred to as topic clusters. These are topics related to a central idea, helping you create high ranking, high quality, useful, and unique content that provides your audience with value.
Content clusters are groups of keywords, or subtopics, that are created around a main topic. It lets you cover a number of related keywords spread through interlinked topics, establishing your website as an authority in your industry, both for search engines and users.
Content clusters comprise of two components; a pillar page, and cluster pages:
These pages are interlinks using hyperlinks.
Content clusters help you optimise your content to improve user experience (SEO). As you probably know, UX is an important ranking factor. Google has focused on identifying user intent for search queries and then displaying relevant results, as we saw when Google rolled out the Hummingbird algorithm, back in 2013.
Since Hummingbird, there have been a number of algorithms and updates introduced, including RankBrain, which has helped search engines understand the context of searches using past queries and user satisfaction. Google continues to alter algorithms, making ongoing improvements, which means you may have to adjust your approach to content creation. Rather than creating content that target individual keywords, you want a user-focused content strategy that brings your website together harmoniously.
Content clusters simply the process, building an organised content scheme for your website. It improves your website hierarchy, helping google determine the website ranking of your pages.
It's not uncommon to arrive at the supermarket to buy one or two items, only to leave with a trolley load of things. We all experience this. Your website visitors can have the same experience, when they arrive on your site to read one article, only to be interested in other relevant topics.
Content clusters help you create a blog with supplementary information around a particular topic that may be useful for your readers. It enables you to create content covering the entire purchasing funnel. A users search intent is based on where they are in their purchasing journey. Awareness stage has informational intent, they are looking for answers to their questions, while consideration stage is content that describes or compares similar products. Decision making stages require transactional intent, they are looking for the pages where they can make a purchase.
Reports show that B2B buyers read up to five pieces of content before they contact a salesperson. Content clusters make it possible to bring in relevant traffic, provide valuable information, and improve conversions.
Content clusters are valuable to your SEO efforts, helping you improve content relevance, providing structure to your website. They help provide a positive user experience, providing readers with an easy to understand and accessible content structure. If you are looking for a reliable digital marketing agency that can create high quality, relevant, and valuable content clusters as part of your effective SEO strategy, then give Genie Crawl a call now.
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