When you have been posting on your blog for quite some time, you probably have a specific number of good content for your visitors. But would they easily find all the information they need? To create things simpler, you may want to investigate creating topic clusters. Topic clusters, or content hubs, will help your visitor and the search engines find all the information related to a specific category in a far more convenient and logical way.

Without a logical plan, your content could become repetitive and disseminate bizop.org, helping to make your website more difficult to navigate. Ultimately, you get with several web pages and blog posts that cover similar topics.

What are topic clusters?

Topic clusters are organized sets of content around a particular topic. Each specific topic has a specific page that provides an index or table of contents. The critical page sometimes referred to as a pillar page, is a summary with links to the numerous other pages covering aspects of that topic. Additionally, the more in-depth content links back once again to the pillar page.

Creating this linked structure makes it easy for your visitors to get all the data on a specific topic. Plus, this uniform linking structure enables search engines to crawl throughout your pages quickly.

What makes a page a pillar?

A pillar page can be the main page on your website or a detailed post in your website navigation. It must be focused on your target topic, and the information must be high quality and comprehensive. Your pillar pages should cover the main aspects of the subject entirely but at a higher level. This allows you to URL to other website content related to that particular topic that goes into more depth. These in-depth posts also need to link back once again to the pillar page. This cross-linking results in the information forming a group that helps visitors find all the data they need.

The topic cluster model also tells search engines that your pillar page is an authority on the topic. By linking all content within that topic to at least one page, you signal to search engines that your content has significant coverage and depth across the subject.

Benefits of topic clusters

Organizing your content into clusters has benefits for you, your visitors, and the search engines. These include:

• A far more organized website with content that covers a topic completely across multiple posts.
• Better user experience and conversions of visitors into leads. Well-organized content sends a solid message to visitors that your business could be the expert. You can find more engagement across all of the posts in the cluster.
• Improved SEO that helps your blog become an authority on a specific topic. Clustering your content enables you to optimize the main keyword for many long-tail keywords that can help drive additional traffic.
• Content that is more comprehensive and better serves your audience. This increases the perceived value of the information for your visitors.
• A streamlined content marketing strategy is focusing on the topics highly relevant to your target audience.

How to get started reorganizing your content

Creating these topic clusters will need some planning. Implementing the topic clusters will undoubtedly take some time. Below are a few tips to obtain started.

Start with a content audit.

You have to know what content you have and whether it could have to be updated or eliminated. A content audit can help you see what content you have when it is still relevant and whether you’ll need to update or destroy it. Weeding out the old content that’s no more relevant could be the first faltering step in streamlining your content.

When you have a WordPress website, use a plugin called WP All Export. You can export your blog posts into a personalized CSV file. You can choose what data to ship, including published and modified date, title, complete content, keyword, categories, SEO title, meta description, permalinks, all taxonomies, and custom fields.

When you have the spreadsheet of content information, use that to arrange your posts. Hopefully, you have been using strategic categories in your blog, which are similar to topic clusters. It would help if you used that to sort your content and begin the clustering process.

Align your content with customer needs

Your ideal clients have problems as possible solutions. What do they wish to know as possible help them with? Use this information to come up with a strategic set of topic clusters you’ll need for your website.

Your content should address these problems, which means your audience sees you as someone who understands them and will help them. If your content doesn’t align with how you allow your visitors, you will need to rethink your content.

If you aren’t sure, do keyword research to define the topic in more depth. Use tools like Answer the Public to provide you with a set of questions associated with your case.

If your topic cluster is about remodeling, Answer the Public gives you 76 questions that you need to use to publish content. As an example, one of the questions is “What remodeling increases home value” It is simple to turn that question into a post within the remodeling topic cluster. Remember, as possible, break a bunch into more granular topics such as kitchen remodeling and bathroom remodeling. This can help your visitor a lot more if they are concentrating on a specific remodeling project.

Map your content into your strategic clusters

Go back to your content spreadsheet and organize your existing content into your strategic topics. This can enable you to see where you stand missing content. When you have a bunch that has several posts of recent, relevant content, start there.

Create your pillar page and URL to your existing content. If you have an area of this topic where you don’t have content to URL to, you’ve found a distance in your content. Filling content gaps makes to your credibility.

Determine what to do with content that doesn’t fit

When you have content that doesn’t fit into many strategic topic clusters, you have to know what to do with it.

Can it still be strongly related to your organization? If yes, it could provide the building blocks for another cluster to fill out with other posts. You might have only written a couple of pieces on that topic, but you will add that to your content strategy. If it’s no more relevant, eliminate out-of-date or irrelevant content.

All content is strategic.

I use this phrase a great deal when speaking with small company owners. The content you spend time writing should add value to your web presence and help attract your ideal clients. Writing unrelated content on your website for the sole intent behind building links is a waste of time. Using topic clusters is a great way to organize your content and ensure it is relevant. Without this sort of organization, you may stray from the critical topics of your business.

But take it one step at a time. You can’t reorganize your entire content quickly. Start together with your most critical topic and organize that. Then keep taking care of others until your website becomes a source of quality, expert information.