Company blogs often resemble that cupboard under the stairs you’re embarrassed to open when people come round. You know what I mean. All kinds of random things thrown in over time. Multiples of the same things accumulating because the first one got forgotten about. It happens all the time with business blogs when there’s no
Company blogs often resemble that cupboard under the stairs you’re embarrassed to open when people come round.
You know what I mean. All kinds of random things thrown in over time. Multiples of the same things accumulating because the first one got forgotten about.
It happens all the time with business blogs when there’s no long-term plan or strategy.
You sit down at the end of the month and think, “right, we need 4-5 blogs for the next month, what are we going to do?”
This scattergun approach to content creation doesn’t just waste your time and resources. It can also hurt your SEO and online visibility.
This is where content clusters and topical authority come in to help.
TL;DR: Content clusters build topical authority on your website, which helps you rank higher on Google. Content clusters are essentially organised content hubs around a specific topic that’s relevant and helpful for your audience.
If you think about what your business does. Whether you’re selling houses or composite fencing. You’ll have some broad topics to talk about.
But within those bigger topics are smaller topics that are also important but need more time to explain them.
A content cluster is a way of breaking a larger topic into smaller parts so you can cover it as comprehensively as possible in a structured way.
It’s a lot easier to picture this in an image, so here’s a visual of a topic cluster structure we’ve borrowed from HubSpot.
The “Pillar” content (the circle in the middle) is your broad topic that you want to create content about.
This is usually a long piece of content – sometimes several thousand words – that covers a single topic at a high level.
The smaller circles around it are subtopics of the main theme. These become separate articles that cover those subtopics in more detail than you can on the pillar page.
The greeny blue lines? They’re internal links connecting the pillar page to the cluster content, and vice versa.
You’re actually reading part of a content cluster with this blog.
Here’s how we’ve done it.
As an SEO Agency, a main topic for us to cover is SEO.
So we’ve created a pillar page on SEO for businesses.
As well as this blog you’re reading, we’ve got other cluster content:
As well as other existing blogs, plus others we’re planning to write in the future.
All of this combined is what creates the content cluster with the pillar page linking to the individual articles. And the individual articles linking back to the pillar page.
It can seem complicated.
But it’s not.
It’s just about picking a topic that’s relevant to your business (that you want to be an authority on) and then breaking it down into every question a potential customer could have about it.
Let’s say you’re an estate agent.
An example piece of pillar content for you could be “The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling a Home in [your area].
This is a relevant topic because this is what your customers are looking for, and it’s something you want Google to see you as an authority on.
Underneath that guide, your cluster topics could be:
You could then go into detail for house buyers
Your pillar page would provide the high level overview of buying and selling a house, your cluster content would go more in-depth on the different subtopics mentioned in the pillar page, and internal links would connect everything to make it easier for readers and search engines to find the content.
If you’re not sure where to start with this, you can use SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush or Wincher to research content topics related to your pillar page.
Back in the day, SEO used to be about keywords.
You’d pick a keyword, write something, and publish it.
If Google thought your article best matched the keyword, you’d rank.
Modern SEO has moved way past keywords.
We’d say this shift started back in 2013 with Google’s Hummingbird update.
Essentially, this is the first time Google started to think about the intent behind a search, rather than just the keyword.
A couple of years later, Google’s RankBrain update went a step further. Using machine learning, Google started to use similar past searches to put more context behind a search, to find relevant content to show in SERPs.
And as algorithms have advanced further, Google continually prefers websites that can demonstrate “topical authority” about a subject, and that’s another area content clusters can help with.
Topical authority is basically the perceived level of expertise or authority your website has around a particular subject.
The more authoritative and reliable Google sees your website, the higher you’ll rank.
Content clusters help you build topical authority because you’re creating a large volume of in-depth, quality content about only a few subjects (rather than creating random blogs chasing keywords).
If you think about the structure of a content cluster we showed earlier, you’re not just talking about a subject at a high level. You’re breaking it down into component parts and covering every aspect of that topic in great detail.
When Google crawls your site and finds your expert content on a subject, it’s going to recognise you as a reliable source and put you higher in search results.
Which makes sense.
If someone searches for advice around dentistry and tooth health, Google is more likely to show dentist websites rather than a marketing agency with a random blog about the dangers of sugar for tooth decay.
Which website is most likely to be the authority on the subject?
But it’s important you pay attention to one important aspect of your cluster strategy.
Internal links are an essential element of your content strategy when following the cluster model.
Internal links are important because they help Google move around your website and find pages it might otherwise miss.
If you think about looking at a map.
You might have towns marked, but with no clear path to get to them, you’re not going to be able to get there.
Search engines work the same way. With no clear link between your pages, it’s easy for Google to miss a page and not index it, which means it’ll never be found.
And this means you’ll miss out on the topical authority for your site.
This is why it’s important to properly plan out your content cluster strategy, including building internal links from your main pillar content to the surrounding cluster content and back again.
With internal links pointing the way around your content, you’ll have a much easier time of Google finding, crawling and indexing your pages and seeing the benefits.
If you’re going to create a content cluster, you should make sure you have the search volume to make it worth it.
It can be a lot of work creating all the content you need for a decent cluster, and it might not be worth that time if you’re targeting a keyword with too few searches.
On the other hand, you also don’t want to go too broad.
For us, for example, we wouldn’t just do a content cluster on digital marketing. It’s way too broad a topic. Even the subtopics of digital marketing (SEO, PPC, content etc) have multiple subtopics themselves.
That’s why we’ve focused on SEO for businesses.
It gives us enough broad appeal to get search volume, without being too broad that we’d never be able to cover every part of it.
SEO is always changing but it’s changed far quicker in the last 12 months.
With LLMs like ChatGPT becoming more popular for fast answers, and Google recently rolling out its AI mode, it’s a fair question whether content clusters and topical authority still matter.
But the answer is yes.
That’s because topical authority helps your entire website rank higher, not just your informational content that might now be swallowed up by AI overviews.
When it comes down to it, customers are still using Google search (and other search engines) in huge numbers, particularly when it comes to buying a product or service, not just when looking for information.
Hopefully you’ve now got a better idea about the value of content clusters and a clearer understanding of how to put them together.
If you need more information or want to talk about how our search engine optimisation agency can help improve your website’s online visibility then feel free to get in touch.
Or you can look through the rest of our SEO content to help you get a better idea how search engine marketing works and how you can use it effectively for your business.
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