On this day that celebrates LOVE😍 we feel compelled to share with you our infatuation with Topic Clusters.
As a content marketer, the rules are ever-changing on how to best gain organic visitors to your website. Google dramatically changed the game by introducing context to the indexing process so that previous keyword-focused pages do not perform as well. Now you need to share related topics with the search engines. The rose-colored glasses scenario on sharing related topics is that now your website can rise up in the ranking game in all of those related topics together!
Pillar Pages
The first key step to running a topic cluster strategy is to create a pillar page that is a deep dive into a specific topic. It will also connect all of your content in a written format on your website. Typically this is a website page, but it could be a blog post. Best performing pillar pages have at least 1,500 words and include internal links to all of your subtopic material (and vice versa).
How to Determine Related Topics and Content
Well, first you need to rethink your strategy by organizing your content within groups of related pages, blog posts, and articles around a single idea (your pillar page). For example, Owning a Dog could be your pillar page topic idea and related posts about dog ownership would be your related content such as: picking the best dog food, how much exercise does your dog need, is a toothbrush necessary for dog care, etc. Here is a visual from HubSpot's Topic Cluster tool to help.