Why are topic clusters important?

Content marketing has seen many changes over the past several years. Many of these changes can be attributed to the rapidly evolving search landscape, as well as the shift in the way people search, discover, and consume content online.

All that said many marketers still experience the same points that were common five to 10 years ago.

1. I struggle to measure the return on investment of the content I create
2. We know the content we are creating provides value, but we still don't seem to rank high on Google for our target keywords.
3. I have done my keyword research. Now what?

Let me start by telling you that, creating more content in the hopes of having your website show up on Google, is not the answer. Adding more content to an outdated existing site architecture can make it harder for Google to find and rank your content. That's not a situation any marketer wants to find themselves in.

The answer to these problems spans way beyond the amount of content your business publishes per week or month. The real problem lies in the way that most content strategies are being developed and organized. SEO is evolving and marketers need to adapt.

Today, we live in a digitally informed world, one where there are millions of people searching for content every minute, as well as millions of pieces of content being published online every minute. This makes the job of search engines like Google increasingly difficult to serve you the most relevant, high-authoritative content possible.

To remain a relevant and helpful search engine, Google released a series of algorithm changes over the past several years. The first notable update, which shook things up, was the Google hummingbird algorithm update in 2013. This update focused on parsing out phrases, rather than focusing on specific search queries. Many search engine optimizers and content marketers viewed this as an initial shift from a keyword to a topic focus.

The next major update happened in 2015, Google's rank brain algorithm update. Rank Brain is Google's machine learning, artificial intelligence system that interprets people's searches, to find pages that might not have the exact words they search for. Google is able to do this by associating past search history with similar themes and pulling together keywords and phrases to provide a better context-driven search engine results page.

For more information on the evolution of SEO, check out this post on Google Updates

All this change brings the opportunity to be found by your ideal audience. That's a key facet of creating successful content in today's online environment. Most forget it's not just about creating content for the search engine. Search engines aren't the ones filling out the forms on your website. Search engines aren't the ones sharing your content on social media. Search engines aren't your customers. Humans are.

If you wanna create effective content that converts visitors into leads and eventually, customers, you need to create a helpful, positive user experience that solves for both the searcher and the search engine, not just one or the other.

Here is how you can solve for both

Create targeted clusters of relevant content that each cover a specific topic in depth. These targeted clusters then need to lead to a centralized hub known as a pillar page.

A pillar page also known as a content power page, is a website page that covers a topic in-depth and is linked to a cluster of related content. The topic cluster model, at its very essence, is a way of organizing a site's content pages using a cleaner and more deliberate site architecture. Topic clusters rearrange the architecture into clusters of related content that link to a central pillar page.

Each pillar page should provide a comprehensive overview of the topic you are writing about. By linking all internal content within that topic to a pillar page, search engines such as Google can easily scan all the content and understand that there's a semantic relationship between the page's content.

The cluster setup also signals the search engines that there is real breadth and depth in the content, which gives the pillar page more authority on the topic. Algorithms like Google Rank Brain reward this orderly linking with higher search placement. So whether you are new to creating content or just getting started, consider mapping out the topics your business wants to be known for and build authority around. Then, map and organize your site architecture to support it.