Mastering Topic Clusters: A Comprehensive Guide for Content Strategists

Keeping up with ever changing search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms is painful. And now, with Generative AI (GenAI) the burning question for content strategists and content marketers is, is search engine optimization (SEO) viable? The answer is yes — with one caveat.

A topic cluster strategy must be part of your overall content strategy — and certainly part of your SEO strategy. This article explains what a topic cluster is, how they are important to SEO and your content marketing strategy, and what a topic cluster strategy must have. It also explains why we often confuse topic clusters with content clusters.

Let’s take a step back and look at how marketers typically embrace Content Clusters vs Topic Clusters.

What Are Content Clusters

A content cluster looks at the aggregate of pages around a given topic. To best understand this, think about when your organization is offering a new product or service. The questions that come up are:

• Do we have a page on this?

• Do we have a data sheet?

• Is it mentioned on our product page

• Is it on our pricing page?

• Have we done a webinar on it?

• Do we have an illustration that depicts it?

You get the picture. You are taking an inventory of whether that topic or product is mentioned in all of the usual places. Once you check the box, your job is done, right?

Not so fast.

That product page is usually a paragraph on the topic — especially if that topic is just a feature within a bigger solution. It in no way convinces anyone that you actually know what you are talking about.

Think of it as seeing a sweater in a store window — and going in and finding there are no other sweaters in there. It might be the best sweater in the world — but at a glance, you don’t consider this a great place to buy sweaters.

That brings us to Topic Clusters.

• What is a Topic Cluster?
• Topic Cluster Examples
• What is a Content Cluster?
• Content Cluster Examples
• Content Cluster vs. Topic Cluster
• Why You Should Consider Topic Clusters
• The SEO Impact of Topic Clustering
• Getting Started With Topic Clusters

Note the third bullet — What is a Content Cluster. If you are writing about Topic Clusters, you need to be able to talk about Content Clusters and the relationship between Topic Clusters.

This is an ideal way to disambiguate — and teach your prospects about a common misconception they might have. At one of my former companies, we were losing deals because we didn’t do something. Turns out we didn’t do it because we had a better way. So we did a story on why [the old way] wasn’t enough. The best part, our story took over the top rank — for our competitor’s feature!

You can see that it’s important to find any adjacent topics and subtopics.

When addressing an SEO topic cluster, we are thinking about:

• Variants and synonyms used
• Semantically related keywords
• Any subtopic or related content
• Questions Asked

“Questions Asked”; this bullet point helps you think of your target audience’s intent. Also known as search intent, it refers to the underlying motivation someone has when searching online.

In its search rater guidelines, Google uses the acronym E-E-A-T, which stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Understanding user intent plays a significant role in Google’s ranking to ensure the most relevant search results and overall user experience.

Here are five common intents used in digital marketing, with the fifth one very important for mobile users:

• Navigational Intent — looking to find it on your site
• Informational intent — becoming educated around a subject
• Commercial Intent — comparing your product to other solutions
• Transactional Intent — looking to validate their purchase to buy
• Local intent — how can they find it geographically — which is really important for mobile search.

Topic Cluster vs Content Cluster

As part of your content strategy, you often think in terms of building out a page. So when people hear the term cluster — they are thinking in terms of pages — which is related to content clusters, not topic clusters.

For example, a content cluster around content marketing, would have content pages that cover:

• Content Marketing Strategy Best Practices and Tips
• Techniques and Tools for Engaging Content
• Content Distribution: Maximizing Reach and Engagement

Certainly, from a site architecture perspective, it’s necessary to know what pages you have that cover a broad topic. But knowing that you have a dozen pages that mention a specific topic isn’t going to clarify how well your site covers the depth of that topic. It won’t let you know how well you are covering relevant content and associated subtopics. For that, you need a topic cluster approach.

This is where you go deep to see how comprehensively you have covered a specific topic. It’s a difference of perspective, one that leads to unique insights.

Let’s look further.

Topic Cluster Examples

MarketMuse is an essential tool used by content strategists to assess and create their topic cluster content.

Under the Research feature of MarketMuse, we can identify Topic Model, Variants, Related Keywords, and Questions Asked.

Topic cluster example in MarketMuse for the subject “content marketing.”

To understand coverage across your site, we take that list and focus on the topics most important to you. We find those in your inventory and then provide you with insight on Search performance, personalized metrics and other data – including how you currently rank.

Topic cluster example for “content marketing”

In this example of a topic cluster for “content marketing” we can see that the Content Marketing Institute has good coverage site-wide with 937 results. Those are topics related to content marketing that are covered across one or more pages on its site.

• 15% of the results are in the top three positions
• 42% are in the top 10
• 65% are in the top 20

It’s important to note that the 937 result isn’t the number of pages on the site. Rather, it’s the number of topics around the subject of content marketing that are of interest.

In some cases, like for the term “best content marketing books”, there may be only one page targeting it. But for a term like “content marketing”, there are multiple pages covering the topic, each from its own unique angle.

Topic Clusters Best Practices

A topic cluster consists of three components:

A pillar page on a core topic. Pillar content should cover a wide range of user intents. That will give readers enough value to make them click through to the appropriate next piece of content for them no matter where they are in their buyer’s journey.

Use a platform like MarketMuse to find out what people are asking about a given topic, and discover where the gaps are with synonyms for your topic. Filling these gaps will help you move higher in the SERP.

A “Cluster” of supporting pages that cover related topics in more depth. A cluster page tends to have a narrower focus on a specific user intent. This approach isn’t just “find a long-tail keyword and write about it.” It’s about going deep on a particular topic.

MarketMuse lets you find the burning questions people are asking about the topic. You can use these questions as suggestions for stand-alone blog posts or as sub-heads for the article you are working on.

When your piece is near done – use MarketMuse’s optimize feature to see how your topic coverage fares against the highest-ranking sites. The tool shows the vocabulary being used by others — and the density of that vocabulary.

MarketMuse gives you an aggregate content score. Don’t be surprised if you find you have used the same words over and over again — in lieu of using a synonym, or that your content score is off by half. This is a great opportunity to polish up the piece-work in these subtopics and new lexicon.

Internal linking between all of the pages. Links from the cluster pages to the pillar pages are a signal to search engines that the pillar page is the most important in the group. Links from an authoritative pillar to cluster content pass authority to the rest of the cluster. Each link should also have an appropriately descriptive anchor text. This description helps search engines better understand what’s “behind” every link.

Why You Should Consider Topic Clusters

In my opinion, taking a topic-first approach is the best way. Because, if you want to do any sort of evaluation, you need to know:

• What topics are being covered site-wide?
• What pages are covering those topics?
• How are those pages performing in search for those given topics?
• How much Topic Authority do you have around those specific subjects?
• How difficult will it be to improve your coverage of those topics?

The only way to understand the performance of a content cluster is to analyze it as a topic cluster.

The SEO Impact of Topic Clustering

Correctly implemented topic clusters can have a significant impact on SEO results in two ways. First, there’s an increase in site authority and overall page ranking that’s conferred to sites that comprehensively cover their chosen topic(s).

Google’s stated intent is to provide relevant results that match search intent—making use of topic clusters to thoroughly cover a subject tips the odds of achieving a high ranking in your favor.

At a minimum, internal linking helps distribute PageRank, thus improving the SERP performance of pages that otherwise might not do as well.

On-page SEO efforts are becoming increasingly more important. That’s good news for both you and your audience! In fact, the focus on improving user experience is widely recognized as an essential SEO strategy.

Topic clusters are useful regardless of your site’s size. If you want your site to grow, get started using topic clusters today. Keep in mind that the impact of content organization increases with the amount of onsite content. In theory, more content means greater possible coverage of a topic. This assumes that each post is, in fact, in-depth content.

Creating topic clusters isn’t tricky. Covering all of the possible user intents as are relevant to your business is undoubtedly a lot of work, but executing based on the framework we’ve described above isn’t above the talents of a determined content marketer.

Getting Started With Topic Clusters

Topic clusters can be powerful when implemented correctly. Start with your keyword research and focus on producing quality content. Organize your existing content and look for potential pillar pages. Improve those as required, and link it all together.

Then move on to creating topic clusters as part of your regular publishing activities. Soon, you’ll have a content hub with high-quality, organized content that makes it easy for users and search engines alike to find your content.

If you’re wondering, “what impact can this really have for me?” – we’ve got you. Check out how our friends at Yello used MarketMuse to build an authoritative content cluster that drove organic traffic success, elevating their brand profile for the long haul.