Case Study: How Topic Clusters (and MarketMuse) Helped Yello Double Their Organic Traffic

Deteriorating page-one search visibility and the corresponding drop in blog traffic made it difficult for Yello, a talent acquisition platform, to reach their audience. Moreover, the company was affected by low brand recognition making it hard to reach prospects and convert them into qualified leads.

The Yello team knew they needed high-performance searchable content to achieve more significant top-of-funnel growth. So they turned MarketMuse for help in creating topic clusters to improve search authority and establish brand pillars. In short, they created content addressing every possible question around a critical set of topics related to the Yello brand.

Topic clusters are multiple pieces of content linked by topic and sharing a set of related subtopics. Properly executed, this type of plan ensures every piece of content contributes to enhancing your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines.

Yello took a 5-step approach in developing their topic clusters:

1. Identify the topic clusters
2. Determine blog posts for each cluster
3. Create blog posts for each query within the topic cluster
4. Build a topic cluster pillar page
5. Repeat

To identify the topic cluster candidates, Yello looked for general topics that best matched their company’s brand positioning. They confirmed their choices by ensuring there was a reasonable amount of monthly search volume for each cluster.

In determining blog posts for each cluster, Yello aimed to answer every search query surrounding each topic. They created a blog calendar around those topics, identifying existing content, and planning new content to answer each question.

With a plan in place, it was time to optimize their existing content and create new posts to cover content gaps on their site. MarketMuse Content Briefs provide their writers with complete outlines, including title suggestions, subheadings, related topic lists, and links to include so that they’re optimized for search. For existing content, Yello uses MarketMuse Optimize application to edit pages in real-time with a list of related topic suggestions to include in the copy.

The supporting content serves to answer every possible question surrounding a topic. In contrast, a pillar page serves as a guide to that cluster, signaling to search engines expertise on the subject.

Yello tackled one topic cluster at a time merely rinsing and repeating their way to becoming an industry thought leader.

Download the complete case study on Yello.