Topic Clusters & How To Create Them in 3 Easy Steps
Topic Clusters & How To Create Them in 3 Easy Steps.
Content is king, right? You’ve heard it before. Bill Gates coined his 1996 essay on the future of the internet ‘Content is King’ He was right. But SEO has taken these words and cherished them more than any other industry.
Every year SEO gets more user experience-focused and therefore more content-focused. Don’t believe us? Only product-reviews has had as many updates since the start of 2022 as the Helpful Content Update.
So, content is more important than ever, but how do you prioritise content?
You know loads about your industry and your products or services. How do you create extensive, knowledgeable content without creating service pages that are thousands and thousands of words long? Because that would be bad content. How could anybody find information that’s useful in that haystack of text?
Topic Clusters are the answer.
One of the best ways to do this is to create topic clusters around your products or services.
Why?
Firstly, you give yourself ample opportunities to tackle more niche topics and answer very specific search queries. And secondly, you get to show users and Google alike how much of a titan of industry you are.
Here’s what they look like.
*image courtesy of Frase
So how do you do it?
Blog posting is the most effective way to do it. That’s why businesses from software giants to teashops have blogs.
Step 1 : Choose your central theme
In most cases, you’ll want to create a topic cluster around a product or service. That’s because the centre of the cluster is the thing you want to promote.
So, the teashop may choose Jasmine Green Tea as their central theme and find their product page for this.
And this is the URL: www.theteashop.com/products/tea/jasmine-green-tea/
Step 2 : Start Researching & Answering Queries
The whole point of topic clusters is to look like an authority figure on your niche by being able to answer hundreds of queries about your product. You can’t answer all of these on a service page, so you do that on separate blog posts.
The tea shop looks at what people are searching for, what they ask about in store and template a few blog posts.
Then they’ll start writing to answer specific user queries. Examples of these may be:
- How can Jasmine Green Tea improve your sleep pattern
- Jasmine Green Tea vs Herbal Green Tea
- How to make the best Jasmine Green Tea
Step 3 : Topic Hierarchy
By now, I’m sure you’re confident building a topic cluster around your product or service. But how does Google know which page is the centre of the cluster?
This is where link strategy comes in. Don’t worry, there’s no external linking involved here.
Google needs to follow your blog pages back to your service/product page. You’ll often see this in the text with a hyperlink, or at the bottom of the blog there may be a CTA to buy the Jasmine Green Tea that links to the product page.
All of these blog posts can link to each other, multiple times between them. But all of them link back to the Jasmine Green Tea product page. And more importantly, the product page doesn’t link to the blog pages.
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