{"id":6477,"date":"2018-05-30T06:00:51","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T10:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/greentreemediallc.com\/?p=6477"},"modified":"2019-01-09T06:24:14","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T11:24:14","slug":"seo-topic-clustering-improve-ranking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greentreemediallc.com\/seo-topic-clustering-improve-ranking\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO: How to Use Topic Clustering to Improve Your Ranking"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those of you who have written a lot of content for a website, you\u2019ve probably started to notice something.<\/p>\n

Content begins to overlap.<\/p>\n

Different pages begin to compete with each other instead of with the competition. You even start running out of ideas. After all, how many different ways is there to write about Facebook, pottery or running shoes?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s problematic \u2013 particularly as we create so many pages of content that we can\u2019t possibly remember everything we\u2019ve said everywhere. And that creates redundancy, dead ends and lost ideas.<\/p>\n

The solution is topic clustering. Here, instead of writing content directed at one specific long-tail keyword, what we aim at producing is high-quality content that\u2019s aimed at topics instead. This serves a number of advantages, such as that it makes your page easier to oversee both for your content team as well as your visitors, as well as helping you rank better in search results.<\/p>\n

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Picture by Tyler Franta on Unsplash.com<\/p><\/div>\n

So how does topic clustering work?<\/h2>\n

The idea is quite simple. Instead of having all of your pages at an about equal basis, you create a new level, which functions as a top-level topic introduction and which has links to all the individual articles which are related to that page.<\/p>\n

The pages at this new level are known as \u2018pillar pages<\/a>\u2019 and their existence nestles content into different groupings which aren\u2019t all that different from silos<\/a>. The idea is that the pillar page covers the general outline of the topic and offers up hyperlinks to allow people to go more in depth into specific aspects of that topic.<\/p>\n

This makes it far easier to oversee what content is out there and how it relates to each other. That\u2019s beneficial for your visitors, your content creators and, of course, search engines.<\/p>\n

In fact, the reason that topic clustering came about in the first place is due to changes made by Google to their ranking systems. As a result, experimentation showed that if topics were woven together more tightly in this way, they ranked better in search engine results.<\/p>\n

So yeah, though it\u2019s a lot of work, it\u2019s definitely worth it to start creating such topic clusters on your site.<\/p>\n

Initial implementation \u2013 the topics<\/h2>\n

The first step to getting your topic clustering organized is to let the idea of keywords slide \u2013 at least for now. Instead, what you want to figure out what topics you\u2019ve got. There are a number of different ways to do so, depending how you\u2019ve been organizing your site.<\/p>\n