Topic Cluster: The Future of SEO
What if I say that soon our whole effort of building SEO on keywords might rest in peace. While you might be busy building your website on the pile of Keywords, your competitors might be busy configuring their website structure according to the new SEO algorithm.
With the evolving search trends like Voice search and Local search, the Search Engines are developing algorithms to favor topic based contents instead of fragmented keyword searches.
Let’s understand with an example.
Earlier if one had to search a restaurant, they would search for phrases like “Best restaurants in Mumbai”. But now, the paradigm is shifting. We simply search “Best restaurants near me”.
With the increasing trend of the Google voice search and inclination towards hyperlocal search, the possible permutation of keywords and the resultant phrases are multiplied.
In order to take care of the shift in user search behavior, search engines are now shifting towards the “Topic Cluster” model.
The question is how to configure your website structure according to the new SEO algorithm?
As the name suggests, Cluster means a group of similar things, positioned together.
At present, in order to capture more keywords on their website, people keep pushing content with the relevant Keywords. Whenever a trending topic hits the market, writers immediately catch hold of it and publish an article in order to get a competitive advantage over the trending keywords.
I am sure, this is the best strategy to cover most of the keywords. But in the overall process of gathering relevant keywords, the structure of the website or blog becomes very random. Something like this:
Often we end up writing numerous articles covering the same keywords, resulting that our very own articles compete against each other in the SEO game.
In content clustering, rather than focusing on keywords, we focus on the bigger picture i.e topic. The entire website’s content is divided into major topics which are needed to be covered. With help of the topic cluster the overall architecture of the website becomes more structured.
All the pages that cover similar topic area are linked to a central page known as the “Pillar Page”. For example, say we are a Design and Marketing firm and involved topics could be Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Motion design, UX/UI, Inbound marketing, content Marketing, Affiliate marketing, Referral programs, etc.
So now if I want to cluster these topics, there can be three pillar pages, i.e. Design, Marketing and SEO.
Our topic will form a cluster around the relevant pillar pages. These pages are known as Cluster Topics.
Further, these Pillar pages are nothing but an article page which covers all its cluster topics in general. These Pillar pages links to the topic clusters and the topic clusters link back to the Pillar page.
Linking of all the content under a topic to a pillar page would make it easy for the search engines to crawl the content. Also, it will tell search engines that these particular topics are similar and hence interlinked with the help of a Pillar page.
As the number of cluster pages linked to the pillar pages increases, The authority of Pillar page Increases. Thus increasing its chance to rank in search result.
Also if one topic performs well, the entire cluster gets a boast.
Well, this is it. All you need to do is cluster your topic wisely and link them to the pillar page.
If you have any question, please let me know in the comment. In case you liked this please give me as many claps as you feel. If you want to learn more about SEO, you can subscribe Ungrammary on Youtube and also have a look at our other SEO videos.
Canonical Tag — How to solve SEO for Duplicate Content
