How to Use Topic Clusters to Improve Website Traffic
Looking to drive more traffic to your business website this year? Google algorithms are constantly changing, which can make it harder to maintain your search engine rankings. Utilizing smart blog strategies like topic clusters and pillar pages can help. Topic clusters allow you to organize your content while enabling you to generate endless articles. Below is everything you need to know about topic clusters and how to use them to benefit your business.
What are Topic Clusters?
Topic clusters are a group of interconnected and themed articles or pages on a website. A topic cluster begins with one pillar page, which provides a main overview of the cluster topic. All topic cluster pages or articles will link back to this pillar page. By using topic clusters, you can improve your ranking for that topic, thus driving more traffic to your website.
Benefits of Utilizing Topic Clusters
Topic clusters can boost your SEO, as your website will become known as a topical authority on these topics. The more quality content you produce on a relevant topic, the higher your business website will rank for those keywords. Furthermore, as these topic cluster articles link to a single pillar page, your website’s relevance and trustworthiness also increase.
Some key ways that topic clusters work to improve SEO include:
- Gain additional traffic for keywords with lower search volumes
- Rank higher for long-tail keywords
- Pillar page content drives traffic for the more competitive keywords
- Increases credibility on a topic, supported by other content
Overall, topic clusters work to build your brand as an authority on a topic. This, in turn, helps to build your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) ranking signals. These are critical to how Google and other search engines rank websites, especially as the algorithms look to promote pages that are credible with links and references.
How to Get Started
Building topic clusters can seem like a lot of additional work. However, you probably already have several articles you can link to start your topic cluster. The best way to begin is by choosing your broad, overarching topic. Then, it is time to do some topical keyword research, which will help you plan out some blogs and articles relating to the main topic. Set up your pillar page, remember that this should be an overview of the topic, as you write and create articles or blogs, you will go back and add links to them, from this pillar page.
Begin writing your additional blogs or articles, you can even link to relevant service pages. For blogs or articles you already have published, go through and optimize them. Remember to utilize the topical keywords and create an organic link to the pillar page and to other relevant pages on your website. Internal linking helps search engines crawl your content while also guiding visitors toward other related content.
Topic clusters offer many benefits to businesses in the modern age. Not only do they provide assistance in boosting your search engine rankings, but they encourage visitors to stay on your website longer. Furthermore, these clusters give you an almost endless stream of ideas for new blog topics, as you can create very focused articles. Take some time to review your content and create a topic cluster to enjoy the traffic benefits yourself.