A Look at MarketMuse Clustering Technology

Keyword clustering capabilities in the market have stopped short of delivering specific recommendations and content strategy advice. They skip steps, have difficulty clustering all the topics/keywords and are unable to name clusters well. Current solutions are typically delivered by companies who can’t extract topics from pages and lack sufficient keyword research, rank tracking and SERP history infrastructure. 

MarketMuse has the ability to do all of these things, combining this information with MarketMuse Inventory data to provide explicit recommendations and a robust range of prioritization options. 

Current Keyword Clustering Solutions Fall Short of the Mark

While traditional keyword clustering tools have been a staple in SEO strategies, they often fall short of meeting the complex needs of modern content strategists. These tools frequently struggle to:

• Accurately capture search intent: Beyond simple keyword matching, understanding the underlying purpose behind a search query is crucial for creating relevant and valuable content. Current tools often overlook the nuances of user intent, leading to suboptimal clustering.
• Leverage semantic relationships effectively: While semantic analysis has improved, many tools still struggle to fully grasp the complex relationships between words and concepts. This limitation can hinder the identification of relevant keywords and topic clusters.
• Provide actionable insights: Beyond basic clustering, content teams need tools that offer actionable recommendations, such as content gap analysis, topic prioritization, and competitive intelligence. Many keyword clustering tools fall short in this area.

The True Purpose of Keyword Clustering

Ultimately, keyword clustering should be a tool to drive strategic content decisions, not just a categorization exercise. By focusing on these key questions:

• How much content do I need? This requires analyzing keyword clusters of your SERP competitors to better understand the amount of content required to capture a significant share of search engine traffic.
• What pages should I update? Effective clustering should identify existing content gaps, opportunities for content repurposing, and areas where content requires refreshing to align with evolving search intent.
• What content should I create? Successful clustering uncovers new content ideas, helps prioritize topics based on user needs, and ensures content aligns with overarching business goals.

By shifting the focus from mere keyword grouping to answering these strategic questions, businesses can leverage keyword clustering to create content that truly resonates with their target audience and drives tangible results.

The MarketMuse Clustering Process

First you tell MarketMuse what you want clustered — it’s what we call the scope. That could be an entire site, a topic, a page, or something else. Note that you don’t need to provide a list of terms to be clustered, although you can. 

Next you decide how you want those clusters prioritized. This enables MarketMuse to present you with the best opportunities and recommendations.

Based on those inputs, MarketMuse will build out the clusters, prioritize them, and calculate cluster metrics for the top ones.

MarketMuse Clustering Technology

The user-defined scope drives the initial creation of the topic universe:  

• Specify a site and MarketMuse analyzes all the site’s pages to create the initial list — a great starting point for an initial analysis of your site’s opportunities.
• Specify a page and the analysis will be restricted to that page — a good choice when you want to build out supporting content for a powerful page.
• Specify a topic to make it the center of the topic universe — ideal when you want to build topic authority around a specific topic.
• Specify a list of terms to cluster — if you’ve previously done keyword research, use this option to cluster your existing list.

There are additional options for specifying the scope, allowing for a more nuanced approach.

Next, MarketMuse sets about creating a topic universe. Depending on the scope, that could include ranking keywords, related terms, the MarketMuse Knowledge Graph, and additional information. If you provided your own list, then that’s the universe. MarketMuse takes into account both semantic relationships and SERP similarity when clustering terms. 

Beyond the Keyword Cluster

As previously mentioned, keyword clustering is just a means to an end and isn’t the end itself. Here’s what else MarketMuse does to answer how much content is required, what pages should be updated and what new content needs to be created.

Competitive Analysis 

MarketMuse runs a competitive analysis on the top 10 SERP competitors to determine:

• How many keywords in the cluster they rank for.
• How many pages they have targeting the cluster terms.
• The percentage of traffic they’re capturing.

This data is used to inform the optimal recommended strategy for content cluster optimization.

Keyword Overview

MarketMuse cluster analysis includes a table of data about the terms that make up the cluster:

• Keyword
• Parent (keywords with the same parent can be targeted by the same page)
• URL (of your existing page)
• Ranking (if your existing page ranks)
• Monthly Search Volume
• Topic Authority
• Personalized Difficulty
• Intent Match

This data is used to inform recommendations regarding what pages to update and what new content to create. 

Recommendations

MarketMuse provides detailed content recommendations that can be used next in the planning process. Here’s an example:

• Content Group Name: Content Marketing Strategy
• Target Personas: Content Marketers, Digital Marketers, Marketing Managers, Business Owners
• Search Intents (SERP): Informational Intent, Commercial Investigation
• Explicit Intent Groupings: Defining the word or phrase, Researching reputation
• Funnel Stage: Consideration
• Inventory Topics: content marketing strategy framework
• Non-Inventory Topics: content marketing plan, content marketing tactics, content marketing examples, content marketing best practices, content marketing tools
• Analyzed Questions: What is a content marketing strategy framework? How do you create a content marketing plan? What are some effective content marketing tactics? Can you provide examples of content marketing? What are the best practices for content marketing?

Takeaways

Keyword clustering has evolved from a basic organizational tool to a strategic cornerstone for content creation. While existing solutions often fall short in providing actionable insights and recommendations, MarketMuse offers a comprehensive approach. By combining advanced clustering technology with in-depth competitive analysis and content inventory data, MarketMuse empowers content teams to make data-driven decisions.

No longer limited to only keyword groupings, MarketMuse helps you determine the optimal content volume, identify pages for improvement, and uncover fresh content opportunities. By aligning your content strategy with user intent and search engine algorithms, you can create content that truly resonates and drives tangible results.

Are you ready to elevate your content strategy? Discover how MarketMuse can transform your keyword clustering efforts into a powerful growth engine.