March 12, 2022 | Read Time: 1o mins | Updated on Nov 24, 2022
What are topic clusters and How can they boost your SEO?
Table of Contents
Topics clusters are groups of related content that cover broad topics within a website. The use of topic clusters is a tried-and-true SEO strategy that can help your website gain topical authority on any number of different topics or subjects. It also lay down an excellent foundation for strong internal linking structures on your website.
The concept of clustering keywords and topics isn’t new for content creators and content marketers but they are about to make a massive comeback in 2022. Google has changed their algorithm to favour topic-based content in recent years and SEOs are exploring new ways of taking advantage of the keyword clustering method.
What is Topic Cluster?
A topic cluster is a group of related content that collectively covers a broad topic area within a website. It’s also a known SEO tactic that helps websites to gain topical authority on a particular topic or subject and also lays the foundation for a strong internal linking structure.
For example, if you are writing about “Electric Vehicles(EVs)”, you could create several pages about the variety of EVs, safety features of EVs, benefits of driving EVs, EV Cost Calculator, EV types etc. You want to write about everything related to EVs that an EV buyer or EV enthusiast might search for.
By following this simple but effective tactic, you create pages on a specific topic that are related to each other and can be grouped under one pillar page. Our goal is to have a set of pages related to the main topic, and the ensemble will span across many searches that will help us create a topical authority in this particular space.
Hi folks. I’m Jonas Sickler(@JonasSickler), an SEO manager at @Terakeet. As SEOs, we always need to do more with less, so this thread is all about using the power of topic clusters to rank faster, expand your audience, and boost conversions. #SEOthread pic.twitter.com/oeNkRDndRc
— Semrush (@semrush) December 7, 2021
Essential Components of a Topic Cluster
There are 3 important components of a topic cluster:
- A pillar page is located at the top of the cluster and it introduces the main topic. It also links to the cluster pages.
- Each cluster page focuses on one part of the main topic.
- Each cluster page links back to the pillar page and the other cluster pages as well. For more details on this please refer to the image below.
- Using Hierarchical URLs to reinforce the semantics of the cluster is vital.
What is a Pillar Page? And How to Build One?
The pillar page is the homepage of the topic clusters. It’s basically the page that hosts all cluster pages and introduces the main topic broadly.
The pillar page should be used to talk about the main topic and introduce each single subtopics of the cluster.
I use the Pillar page as the introduction of the main topic, I answer all the questions that are related to that topic and then talk about the subtopics and link them accordingly. Depending on the topic, you can always provide some historical data or “People Also Ask” section questions here.
When it comes to the length of the pillar page, write as much as you need as long as you introduce the subtopics. You want this page to be comprehensive but not too lengthy. It’s better to think about topic depth here, rather than how long it should be. However, I would still recommend writing a minimum of 500 words.
Topic Cluster Example
Examples are always the best way to describe things in my opinion. Here is an example of a topic cluster:
Pillar Page: Buy a House in Toronto
Subtopic cluster page 1: Cheap Houses for Sale in Toronto?
Subtopic cluster page 2: How to buy a house in Toronto?
Subtopic cluster page 3: Is it the right time to buy a house in Toronto?
Subtopic cluster page 4: The best and safest neighbourhoods to live in Toronto
Subtopic cluster page 5: How much do you need to earn to buy a house in Toronto?
Subtopic cluster page 6: How much should I save for a house in Toronto?
Important Factors to Consider
Users like websites that are well organized, as does Google. Google crawlers don’t have hard times going through a well-structured website and understanding the hierarchical structure. Our goal, as an SEO, is to make sure Google understands the relevancy between our pages and ranks them accordingly.
- Make sure each cluster page URL is prefixed by its parent: The pillar page
For example:
the-pillar-page/a-cluster-page-1
the-pillar-page/a-cluster-page-2
the-pillar-page/a-cluster-page-3
- Redirect users to your money pages: Use some of your cluster pages to redirect users to your money pages. This will help you convert better and also share the link juice to those money pages.
Pro Tip 1
One of the most useful NLP Python libraries for SEO is certainly BERTopic. Without writing too much code you can use advanced linguistic models here.
You can use BERTopic for these use cases:
- Semantic clustering
- Dataviz for visualizing topics and opportunities
- Ideal for testing different semantic models
- Managing multiple cluster points with ease
If you want to test it yourself just import BERTopic and play with it. This library is one of the best tools for Semantic SEO in combination with spaCy.
Want to learn more? Check out this video.
More information on the topic is here
Pro Tip 2
There is an easy way of identifying internal linking opportunities and building topic clusters:
- Run a site:[root domain] search in Google adding both primary and secondary keywords you are looking to rank the pillar page for. Google will return pages it deems contextually relevant to these queries. For example site:https://www.hubspot.com/ + service software + inbound marketing
- Open all the ranked URLs manually into a new tab or scrape them using a Chrome ext. such as Linkclump.
- Within these pages look for exact-match or synonym anchor text that can be quickly edited to include variations of the targeted primary / secondary keywords (don’t sacrifice readability to shoehorn in exact-match versions)
- Add hyperlinks to the target destination page using these anchor texts
- Once scaled, re-submit the site to GSC for crawling
- Voila!
Pro Tip 3
Google’s patents provide a surprising level of insight into how they operate—reading a few of them practically tells you how to create golden content in their eyes.
The Content Clustering patent describes grouping websites and pages by topic and creating something that can be described as expert clusters. Content from these clusters is then given priority when serving search results for a related query.
Entity recognition is one of those things. Building content around ideas will get Google to show the world you know what you’re talking about.
In the example below, you can see how Google recognizes each entity within its text structure and how these words relate to each other with the salience score.
Interestingly, the content that does not belong to a cluster may be skipped by Google without any evaluation, regardless of whether it possesses any of the other content quality signals. This goes to show how vital is topic clusters for SEO.
