Topic Clustering is a powerful SEO strategy.
Topic Clustering is a powerful SEO strategy for effective content planning and structuring a website. Merely creating isolated topics on a site without relevance to the overall site theme is less likely to work these days and may hurt overall SEO performance (ahem Hubspot, Forbes, etc…). The more comprehensive and interconnected your topic clusters are, the greater the chances of achieving results.
inLinks Topic Planner
While I don’t always depend on tools for developing topic clusters, several months ago I received a content idea from inLinks Topic Planner. This idea inspired me to create an article focusing on fine art photography websites. By leveraging InLinks’ analysis of my site’s main topics and generating a relevant topic cluster from my content, I was able to fill in the missing topics (fine art photography websites in this example) and link the related pages together. I quickly noticed an increase in traffic. Today, the article not only ranks for the intended keyword but also ranks #7 for “fine art photography,” as reported by Ahrefs. And you might have noticed the original topic cluster was about fine art photography.
Topic Clustering The Old-Fashioned Way
Using SEO tools is one way to come up with topic clusters; sometimes plain old-fashioned brainstorming also works as well. When I was managing the digital marketing team at Backroads I would schedule a monthly content marketing meeting with my team and various key stakeholders from other departments. In these meetings we would plan the social media calendar a month prior in addition to the content marketing strategy. There were lots of creative ideas that came out of these meetings which made it a lot of fun to be a part of.
One idea that came out of the monthly content marketing meeting was to write a series of travel guides for our most popular trips. The strategy was to build regional content hub pages that link to progressively more in-depth topics such as local food, then an article on wine if it was a renowned wine region. We felt that we could create unique top-of-funnel content because we had hundreds of trip leaders around the world that we could leverage for their in-depth expertise and not merely regurgitate generic travel guide content. We would then market our tours on these content pages.
Topic Cluster SEO Results
My team wrote most of these Pro Tips articles between 2017-2019. Due to a Drupal site migration and COVID, we put a pause on completing this project but we did eventually publish our article backlog in 2021. By this point, I left the company entirely for another role as did my content manager so I don’t think the new team has worked on this since but as you can see these articles still generate a good amount of SEO traffic for the site.
While topic clusters are most commonly associated with SEO, I would argue that the main benefit of this strategy is to create a comprehensive content strategy for your audience. What a topic cluster does is make you consider all of the topics that are relevant to your users and strive to be the definitive source for that information. Once you’ve done that they have you a much greater chance of gaining organic search visibility.