Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After going through this guide, you should be able to understand and be able to develop content clusters to use in your editorial strategies to generate traffic, earned media and conversions, along with recognizing the benefits of using them in your content planning.
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Content clusters are groups of thematically related posts or articles that support a main topic page, also known as pillar content.
A topic cluster model organizes content pages to create a more structured and targeted site architecture. This organizational strategy focuses on clustering related articles together around specific topics, rather than spreading loosely related or unrelated content across multiple pages of a site.
Google and other top search engines have changed their algorithms to favor content that is more topic-oriented. This is because content clusters that are tightly woven around specific topics are easier for Google to locate and serve up in response to increasing users’ queries, compared to content that is loosely organized. The result is easier search and indexing for Google, and better search results for users.
To fully understand what topic clusters are, it helps to understand what pillar content is, as the two are interrelated and dependent on one another.
A pillar page is a central page that covers a topic in depth and links to cluster content. It performs the following five essential functions:
1. Explaining the topic concerned in depth as well as covering a wide sweep.
2. Acting as a taxonomical anchor depending on the type of pillar strategy being used i.e. taxonomy tags vs. pages etc.
3. Aiding user navigation towards the most important themes of the overarching topic
4. Provide consistency and efficiency in your editorial efforts
5. Development of topical authority around the pillar topic by publishing a lot of related content.
Cluster content on the other hand should address a sub-topic (which can also be called a parent keyword) that makes up the coverage of a pillar page.
For example, if you are going to have a travel and leisure site that covers a range of destinations, then the pillar page could be city i.e New York with supporting cluster content being ‘best restaurants in New York’, ‘best attractions in New York’ and so forth.
Collectively they develop one of the cogs that help you develop your overarching editorial strategy.
The short answer to this question is yes, but let’s look at this subject a little more closely in a search context to better understand it.
People started asking search engines more complex questions, and they wanted answers in an accurate and timely manner. As such, search engines needed to be able to recognize connections between these queries.
In response, Google implemented three major SEO updates that allow its algorithm to understand the topical context behind search intent and strengthen the reliance on topics:
1. The first was Hummingbird in 2013, which signified an official switch from keyword to topic focus. This put an end to spanny practices such as keyword stuffing.
2. The second was RankBrain in 2015, which is Google’s machine learning algorithm that enbaled it to better understand the context of users’ search queries. RankBrain connects a search query with closely matching content on the web. It then pulls phrases and keywords related to the search query to return the best answers in the way of the most relevant web pages.
3. The third was BERT or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformations in 2019, which allowed Google to understand to even better the context of a search query along with its search intent. Whereas earlier Google used to process a search query word-by-word, and in sequential order, with BERT Google was able to understand a large body of text as a whole, along with user’s search intent, and the context of the query. BERT can do this because it looks not just at the words that precede a specific word, but also the ones that come after it, to underand the complete context of the query. This is where the “Bidirectional” in its name comes from.
What makes BERT different from all the updates that preceded it is its ability to emulate natural lanugage processing (NLP). It also needs to be noted that BERT does not completely replace RankBrain. Google may use either of the two depending on which is capable of delivering the better results in a given situation.
Pulling your information together into content clusters will put you in a much better position to earn clicks. Of course, there are some challenges that you’ll need to overcome to get the best results.
For instance:
Overcoming these challenges is vital if you wish to build successful content clusters. After all, these clusters will provide structure for your website, and they’re also SEO friendly.
To help you on your way to developing your own effective content clusters, here are some strategies to guide and inspire you:
Performing an audit on your website’s existing pages will help you greatly when it’s time to create pillar pages. Keep in mind the potential for pillars and clusters as you do this. Any sections that don’t apply to your specific focus should either be left alone or deleted altogether.
To do this, you first need to audit your website’s content. To effectively categorize your existing pages, it’s best to start by grouping them by topic focus. This can be done manually or using tools such as Google Analytics.
For instance, let’s imagine you choose the term “Luxury Property Development”. Next, you’d need to catalog your existing content to find thematically relevant material. Here are some examples:
Once you’ve created a complete inventory of your content, next comes on developing a pillar page.
Pillar pages need to broadly cover the topic you’re focusing on so that you can link all related content to it in a sensible way.
Using the Luxury Property Development example again, you’d want to dedicate cluster pages to each of the subcategories listed above.
Moreover, questions you can ask yourself to decide on whether something is a pillar page or not are:
Other litmus tests for the page include whether:
This is where you need to decide whether you need to create new cluster content. Remember whether it’s new or optimized content, the material should explore just one area highlighted by the pillar page.
We’ve provided a detailed guide below that explains how to create content for a new cluster, but the steps listed also apply to creating new content to support an existing cluster.
If you want to be an authority on the term “Luxury Property Development”, then you need to remember to link to the pillar page from your cluster pages.
Pillar content ranks best for competitive short-tail keywords while cluster content ranks better for long-tail keywords.
If you’re missing the necessary content to create a desired cluster, then you’ll need to create new content rather than repurposing existing content.
Topic clusters are geared toward creating an array of content pieces that are distinct, but circle one themed keyword or called parent topic. Therefore, you’ll need to find one main keyword for the cluster article and numerous closely related phrases for the supplemental material.
The first step in creating new cluster content is to conduct keyword research, focusing on topics and long-tail keywords that are relevant to your company and drill down on what your audience might be searching for.
Keyword & topic research also helps you determine topic cluster depth, which is to say, how many pieces of content are sufficient to make up a cluster around a topic. Good keyword research helps uncover keyword breadth and search opportunity for a specific topic, which in turn forms the basis of topic cluster depth.
Tools like Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs or Moz Keyword Explorer can help you identify relevant keywords that are both high-volume and low-competition.
For more information on keyword research please review our detailed module on the subject.
A content gap occurs when you’re not creating content for specific topics, keywords or areas that you should be. If you are only creating informational content, you are only catering to the top of the funnel, that is, the awareness stage. There is thus a considerable content gap in your content creation strategy, wherein you need to be creating content for these other stages of the funnel too.
Here’s how you can plug-in the content gap to make sure your content strategy is comprehensive:
1. Map Your Audience’s Journey: Take time out to visualize the path your average website viewer follows in arriving at your website, the actions they perform once there, and where they go once they leave your website.Then try to chalk out a strategy to make sure you have content that helps guide them at every step of this journey.
2. Perform Market Research: Market research tactics such as surveys help publishers understand exactly what their audience wants.
3. Conduct Competitor Analysis: Analyze your competitors’ websites to see what kind of content and on which topics and keywords are they creating. Then compare it with your own content to see what you’re missing. You can use a tool such as Semrush’s keyword gap analysis tool that helps you see which keywords your competition is covering but you are missing out on.
Once you have a strong overarching topic for your cluster, you need to devise a content pillar strategy before you can jump into actually creating content. To do this, it is good to have all the data from your keyword research ready in Google sheets and/or a tool like Supermetrics for analytics. This helps analyze metrics like existing rankings, user engagement, which your own content would seek to address, avoiding cannibalization, and so on.
Take into account the following in your topic cluster strategy:
For more information on the brasstacks of creating an effective content pillar strategy, refer to our detailed content pillar strategy module.
Once you’ve done the preliminary work, interlinking the pages of your topic cluster will be a breeze. Just remember that your pillar and clusters must link to one another.
Now, when Google’s bots crawl your subject cluster, they can identify, correlate and index more easily, giving your pillar page more SEO juice and deciding how to rank your content.
To ensure that your content strategy is on the right track, you’ll need to measure your results and analyze your topic clusters’ performance. Google Analytics can help you track traffic to your site, see which pages are getting the most hits and identify any patterns or trends in user behavior.
That all sounds easy, right? The challenge is that most of these tools are designed to measure a single page’s performance compared with a large grouping of information. Plus, it’s impossible to separate a subject cluster’s influence from other variables influencing your website data without some preliminary work.
So, a few things must happen before the data is ready for analysis that we’ll go into next.
We’ve put together a brief guide on how to measure your overall cluster performance using Google Analytics. However, if you’re still new to measuring performance with Google Analytics then we recommend checking out our detailed guide on the subject.
Analyzing your results and changing your topic cluster strategy as needed will help you fine-tune your approach and ensure that your content is working hard to attract and engage your target audience.
You can also use Google Search Console (GSC) to monitor your website’s organic search traffic and performance. This will show you which keywords are driving traffic to your website, as well as your website’s average position for those keywords. Check out our detailed guide on how to use GSC.
Keep an eye on your competitor’s activity, too. Use tools like BuzzSumo, and Ahrefs to find out what content is performing well for them and whether you can replicate that success with your own content.
One model that we advocate using to executing your content cluster strategy takes inspiration from the Ski Slope Strategy.
This methodology helps publishers think about publishing velocity as a flywheel, factoring traffic, promotion and sales revenue. You can also use it to devise data-driven quarterly campaigns and direct users to tactical content, which we’ll explain next.
Think of the ski slope strategy as a way of building cluster content that will encourage your visitors through segmented types of content outcome — informational, promotional and tactical — before they arrive at the finish line, which is your offer.
Now, let’s take a look at the three steps required to execute this approach successfully:
These topic cluster strategies allow you to generate demand and a returned user loop for your content and create content flywheels to prioritize your content based on traffic, whether they be promotional or sales driven.
We’re going to skip the first step, as we’ve already covered how to construct content pillars and clusters in some depth already which majorly constitutes as part of the informational content bucket.
Once you’ve planned your pillars and clusters, it’s time to build the second segment in your strategy to help accelerate your site’s traffic growth — promotional content.
Promotional articles are designed to drive a wave of new leads to your site and come in many forms. For example, they might include:
These pieces are meant to attract social shares and backlinks from companies and publishers in a way that your traditional pillar and cluster content might not.
Using listicles as an example, when you publish a high-quality and deeply researched piece on the best software for advertising, non-niche media outlets may link to it as evidence for a broader piece they’re writing about advertising. Moreover, the companies themselves may be inclined to link to the piece if your publication is recognised as a thought leader in the space.
Use a promotion matrix to brainstorm and prioritize what promotions work the best for you. This involves brainstorming a list of marketing ideas and scoring each on how easy they are to implement as well as their potential impact.
While informational content will be the main source of traffic to your site, promotional content is the grease that keeps the wheels spinning. What do we mean by this?
Promotional content is designed to attract a different level of engagement, in this case backlinks. That backlink juice can then be passed on to the rest of the cluster thanks to your careful use of interlinks. This, in turn, helps boost the cluster’s topical authority in Google’s eyes and climb the SERPs. This creates a feed-back loop of exposure for both the informational and promotional content.
Tactical content is the third piece in your pillar and content strategy. While ideally, we plan and execute all three pieces simultaneously, some publishers may choose to wait till the informational and promotional content buckets are already in place before focusing on tactical content. This is because planning and executing an effective tactical content strategy is a little more time and resource intensive than the other two.
Tactical content helps you achieve your monetization goals and, just like promotional content, tactical articles can take many forms. This includes:
Keep in mind, however, that creating tactical content that successfully converts visitors into consumers or subscribers is often challenging and requires a certain level of trust in your brand. Poorly conceived and executed tactical content can easily undo the hard word put into the earlier steps of your content-driven growth strategy.
While creating tactical content, it is also important to factor that:
We’ve covered the things you absolutely must do when building your clusters. However, we’ve also compiled a few tips that — while not absolutely essential — will make your website even better.
Prominently featuring specific content across the homepage and section pages is the best way to tell Google that your story is newsworthy and/or relevant.
For example, placing the content from your cluster at the top of the page will make sure your visitors see what you want them to, while providing an added signal to Google’s algorithms about your intention.
NLP helps machines understand human language better. We’ve seen how with the help of advances in NLP, Google’s BERT algorithm can better recognize parts of speech, perform sentiment analysis, and engage in named entity recognition (NER). All these NLP capabilities can be put to use by publishers for fine-tuning their pillar-content models. Here’s how:
1. Automating Structured Data Markup: Marking up your page’s HTML code using structured data is an essential SEO technique that helps search engines better understand your content.. Using an NLP tool such as IBM Alchemy or WordLift helps automate this process. These tools parse your content using NLP techniques, identify the entities in the content that fall into any of the schema types recognized by Google and other search engines, and mark them up for better discoverability. If you’re not sure what structured data markup is, or why it is important, see our detailed module on Schema to better understand how structured data markup works.
2. Internal Linking: We’ve covered the importance of making your content exhaustive and authoritative. There can, however, still remain sections within your content, where the reader could use more background information to better understand the contents of the page . If it is not easily available, the user may go looking for it on external sources. NLP tools can process your content and highlight the sections that could benefit by the insertion of an internal link to provide the user with more background information from within your website.
3. Topic Targeting: Targeting topics is now becoming as important as targeting specific keywords for SEO. To ensure topical authority, it is important to not only cover a topic from all aspects, but also to cover topics that are semantically related to it. NLP tools use word-vectors to uncover other semantically related topics that publishers can cover to ensure more effective topic targeting.
4. Preparing Content Briefs: NLP tools can also help publishers prepare content briefs that guide writers on topical coverage when creating content. For instance, SurferSEO is a tool that uses NLP to create content briefs for any topic that are optimized for search intent.
While we’ve laid out the steps necessary to build content clusters that have a meaningful impact on your search engine performance, there are still some pitfalls that can easily trip up publishers if they’re not careful.
In this section, we’ll look at two case studies, We Are Explorers and DE ZAAK, and how these publishers nailed their content cluster strategies.
Australia-based We Are Explorers covers the outdoor adventure lifestyle and mindset. Where it differentiates from other different travel magazines is in how it advocates this as a lifestyle.
Even on the weekends, the publisher promotes micro adventures that focus on one-to-two-day trips and rugged experiences — whether it’s canoeing, bouldering or rock climbing — rather than shorter, easier experiences.
In December 2021, SODP began working with the publisher on site structure and implementing a content cluster approach and since then We Are Explorer’s traffic has more than doubled.
What we found from our analysis was that they were using the content cluster strategy, but without focus. Because there’s a limited number of outdoor adventure seekers in Australia, We Are Explorers was targeting multiple categories to try to appeal to as many readers as possible — effectively, it adopted a scattergun approach to publishing.
As a result, some of the site’s categories were’t as prominent, having less content, and didn’t justify the clustering approach.
Because of the site’s broad structure, the more articles We Are Explorers published the more existing content dropped in rankings and traffic. While there were some secondary factors, such as not refreshing content frequently enough, SODP focused on helping the site more clearly define its top content and clusters.
Part of this approach involved changing how We Are Explorers’ destinations sections worked by shifting the clustering of content away from locations and towards Experiences and Activities.
The Destinations category is now primarily used to help visitors navigate the site, improving UX.
Importantly, SODP worked to change the publisher’s workflow on the backend, with a new focus on monthly content creation planning that focuses on reinforcing the performance of a single cluster.
We Are Explorers is also looking to expand its national coverage and it is writing and pitching different clusters with that focus. SODP has advised using the focusing editorial strategy described above to do just that.
Changing the publishing strategy — moving away from a scattergun approach and towards defined clusters — has allowed the publisher to quickly build up its category content, attract sponsors and reinvest in content.
Dutch publisher DE ZAAK has also been working with SODP to build its content momentum.
DE ZAAK creates content for small to medium enterprises (SMEs), focusing on business advice. How these SMEs can better manage their teams, how can they improve their overall business, etc.
DE ZAAK’s main revenue model is built around sponsored deals with brands, where it leverages its email list to help brands reach a wider audience.
When SODP started working with the publisher in March 2022, the website had a number of problems including multiple URLs for the same type of content and a lot of redirections. Additionally, its categorization was not properly done.
SODP’s goal was to give DE ZAAK a better pillar and cluster-based approach where its content would be suitably categorized. This approach would help the overall website grow in terms of visibility and help both Googlebot and the audience understand how the content has been grouped.
At the start of the campaign, the site had more than 3,000 pages that needed to be reviewed. SODP initially started by mapping all of this content in a Google Sheet, making sure the articles were assigned appropriate categories and subcategories. Once the structure was fleshed out and populated, the changes were made to the site.
After the website’s restructuring, which saw several categories such as Business Management prominently highlighted and supported with subcategories, SODP then moved on to creating content recommendations within all these specific categories.
This involved suggesting different content angles, new content formats — such as listicles as well as “What Is” and “How to” articles — as well as creating financial calculators to improve the audience‘s time on site.
These calculators were a big lever in terms of attracting more visitors who were specifically interested in De ZAAK’s niche. For example, articles that provide explanations on how to calculate taxes then recommend a suitable calculator.
The final step was to ensure that all the new content was appropriately interlinked.
From the graph below, you can see this process resulted in a consistent uptick in traffic in the five months from June 2022.
Now that you understand what content clusters are and how they can benefit your website, it’s time to start putting them into action. Here is an overview of things you can do to get started:
By following these steps and the strategies and tips in this course section, you can start using content clusters to improve your site’s SEO and attract more visitors. Just remember to focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that will appeal to your target audience. If you do that, you’ll be well on your way to success.
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