A topic cluster, also known as content pillar or content cluster, is a way to plan and organize your content to improve your SEO.
They’re a group of pages that cover different angles of the same topic.
Each of these pages are interlinked to a pillar page, which provides an overview of the topic.
Note that the pillar page and supporting pages — also known as cluster pages — are linking towards each other.
Why Build a Topic Cluster?
Creating a topic cluster is an efficient way to improve your search rankings, because it achieves multiple SEO goals at the same time:
- it structures your pages in a way that is easily indexed
- it covers multiple search terms for a keyword
- it groups these pages together, signalling that they are topically related
In other words it boosts your SEO through keyword coverage and technical SEO.
And because building a topic cluster requires deep knowledge and research, it also demonstrates your expertise to search engines, thus building topical authority.
What is Topical Authority?
Topical authority is a term coined by SEO professionals to describe your website’s expertise for a certain topic.
To put it simply: the more quality content you have about a topic, the more authority you’ve built for it
and the more authority you build for a topic, the higher your pages for that topic will rank on SERPs.
For example:
A pet grooming website with 50 blog posts about “pet grooming” will likely have high topical authority for it,
but their website won’t rank very high for keywords about “venture capitalism”, because they haven’t established any topical authority for it.
To be clear: topical authority isn’t a real metric; it’s meant to guide webmasters toward planning their content in a way that benefits their search rankings.
How to Build a Topic Cluster
1. Pick a topic that you want to rank on search engines
Make sure you choose this topic based on thorough keyword research.
For this example, let’s target pet grooming as a topic.
2. Create a pillar page for this topic
A pillar page provides a high-level overview of a topic.
For the topic of pet grooming, our pillar page can be titled What is Pet Grooming & Why it’s Important and provide general information about grooming pets.
3. Build cluster pages around the topic
This is the stage where we build multiple cluster pages, to target relevant key phrases around the topic.
For our pet grooming blog, this may include pages about:
- how to groom your pet at home
- tips for finding a good pet groomer
- essential tools for pet grooming
- pros and cons of pet grooming
4. Link your pages together
Each cluster page should link to the pillar page, and vice versa.
Cluster pages can also link between each other, where appropriate.
Clustering our content this way signals to search engines that these pages are topically related.
Key Takeaways
- building a topic cluster is an efficient way to plan and organize your content for SEO
- builds on keyword research to covers multiple search phrases
- structured in a way that is easily indexed to improve technical SEO
- topic clusters helps showcase your expertise, therefore building topical authority
- topical authority helps you rank higher on SERPs