What are Topic Clusters, and How Can They Boost Website Traffic?

Topic Clusters, the recent evolution of SEO, refer to groups of related content that allow you to dominate keyword categories while collectively covering a broad subject area. This model is based on a hub-and-spoke framework and is expected to make a massive comeback in 2023.

While the concept of Topic Clusters isn’t new, it has matured a lot since its inception. Do you want to know more about Topic Clusters and how they can improve your website traffic? Scroll down and find a comprehensive guide outlining all essential details about this SEO evolution. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Table of Contents

What are Topic Clusters?

As the name suggests, a Topic Cluster is a collection of internally-linked web pages created around pillar content focusing on a broad topic. In simple words, it is nothing but strategic internal linking that revolves around a central topic and uses a pillar page to link to and from.

However, creating effective clusters isn’t as simple as it may sound and requires careful planning and thoughtful execution. Your content cluster must begin with a robust pillar page, and then you carefully include links to all-related topic cluster pages. It includes two major components – Pillar and Topic Cluster.

Piller is a hub for a specific topic, and these pages are generally broad and link to multiple cluster pages. Topic Cluster, conversely, is a more in-depth page that answers a specific question about the topic.

This model enables organizations to streamline their content creation while helping them produce better content in the least possible time. The primary objective of using the Topic Cluster approach is to take your content beyond conventional SEO strategies and help you create quality information.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Topic Clusters

New to this approach? Follow the instructions here to create an effective Topic Cluster for your website.

Step 1: Choose a Core Topic

You should start by deciding on the core topic, and whatever you choose, make sure it fits into topics that are important to your business. Choosing the right cluster topic is mandatory, as it will be used to create your pillar page.

Step 2: Conduct keyword research on your core topic

Next, perform keyword research on your core topic to know what you want to include to stay ahead of the curve. Check what your competitors are writing about and what makes their content successful.

Step 3: Decide the Structure for Pillar and Topic Cluster Page

In addition to researching keywords, you must outline the pillar and Topic Cluster page structure to present the content appropriately. Develop relevant topics that can link back to the pillar page when creating outlines.

Step 4: Produce Content

Once you are done, it’s time to take the final action. Produce quality content by keeping your target audience in mind and ensuring they engage with whatever you are writing. When writing for the Topic Cluster, never stuff keywords and focus on quality.
The Topic Cluster model is closely related to Semantic SEO, which addresses all user queries about a particular topic. Hence, it is always advised to organize your content to create a semantic cluster, giving users a clearer understanding of the subject.
Finally, publish the content and add internal links to supporting topic clusters.

How do Topic Clusters help Boost Website Traffic?

Wondering whether Topic Clusters can increase your website traffic? Well, the answer is YES. This concept is closely related to search engine optimization and helps boost your brand image, thus increasing traffic and leads. It is an essential element of an SEO campaign and has become a standard if you want to be visible in the search results.

Here’s a quick rundown of the vital benefits of Topic Clusters that eventually help websites to boost traffic.

Builds Brand Image

Topic Clusters help build your brand image while enhancing brand visibility. The visibility will then further translate into users coming to your site from articles they found in Google search results since they are likely to spend more time on your site, thus contributing to correlating the bounce rate and increasing the average web session time.

Generate organic traffic

Topic Clusters is all about strategic internal linking, ensuring that users stay on your page and find answers in your clustered content. It further helps you rank for more topically relevant keywords while bringing organic traffic to your website.

Moreover, this model allows business to show their authority to people and bots alike by letting you create valuable and accurate content around a specific topic instead of one-off pieces focusing on a specific keyword.

Higher Rankings

Search Engines, like Google, are better at understanding semantically-related concepts. They collect insights from anchor texts used in internal linkings, evaluate the context and value of your content and rank it accordingly in SERPs. It sometimes ranks the content targeting one keyword for several related terms.

As a result of increased rankings, you’ll attract more visitors, and they will likely stick around on-site. It eventually builds a positive feedback loop of increasing traffic and conversions.

Summing Up

Topic Cluster hold great value and help drive the KPIs while enhancing the brand visibility. Moreover, this increases content production speed, as a bulk of work is needed for creating topic clusters. Search engines, like Google, can easily find the relation and hierarchy between your articles and crawl more pages within your website, thus help you bring in organic website traffic.