What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO?

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What are topic clusters and pillar pages

Neil Patel has published a nice blog post on the concept of creating pillar pages, improving their SEO and in the process improving the overall SEO of your website.

In the beginning of the blog post he has also referred to an older Hubspot post that explains in detail how they have been able to help one of their clients improve their search engine ranking for their chosen keyword through a pillar page in particular and topic clusters in general. I had come across this Hubspot blog post a couple of months ago and had been wanting to write about it but somehow, lost the thread while trying to handle other topics on my blog and website.

The Hubspot blog post explains why creating topic clusters are important due to the way people use search queries these days.

Content marketers and search engine optimization experts believe that, due to the complexity and quantity of content available on the web, search engine users don’t use single-word queries. An average query these days consists of 4-5 words.

One reason is, as mentioned above, there is plenty of useless content available on the web and hence, users want to make sure that they give the search engine as much information as possible to zero-in on the right search results.

After all, as this blog post suggests, if you run a query on Google, you may come across billions of search results. But frankly, not many people go beyond the second or the third search results page unless he or she is doing some really important research and there is no other option but to scour through as many search results as possible.

The point is, if you are competing with “billions of search results”, you need to do something exceptional, something that is not possible for most of the people to achieve, to move your rankings to the first page or at least the second page.

The second reason is that more and more people are using voice to search, mostly on their mobile phones. So, when people speak into their mobile phones, they mostly use phrases, day-to-day expressions, to carry out the search instead of single keywords. Something like, “find the best barber near me” or “where is the nearest eating joint selling vegan food”.

I have written multiple times on my blog that writing to improve your SEO is just one aspect of content publishing and content writing. The other aspect is, writing for your ideal persona. The search engines will be ranking your content, but it will be the human beings who will be reading it and then basing their decisions on how they react to your content.

Creating and maintaining topic clusters allows you to gather relevant and interrelated bits of information around a single source and hence, increase the subject-authority of your website or blog.

What are topic clusters?

A cluster means, a sort of a grouping. It’s coming together of different components of an environment or a topic. The same applies to topic clusters.

Topic cluster and pillar page explained

Google is constantly looking for authoritative, specialized content. It wants its users to be able to find as much information as possible through a single source, through a single link. For this, Google wants to showcase authority content.

How does it know that you have “authoritative, specialized” content?

One way of finding that out is, of course when your content is being referred to and responded to by lots of people on the Internet in general and social networking websites in particular.

But when it comes to on-site SEO, it means having lots of good quality content around your chosen topic.

Let’s take an example of my website. Suppose I want to increase my search engine rankings for the keyword or key phrase “SEO content writing services“.

The normal route would be creating lots of web pages and blog posts on my website including the search term “SEO content writing services” – I’m still using this method and I need to explore the concept of creating topic clusters more. I will share my progress on this later.

So, I will create lots of blog posts and articles talking about the various aspects of SEO content writing including

  • What is SEO content writing
  • Why SEO content writing is important
  • SEO content writing doesn’t mean low quality content
  • How to write SEO content
  • How to target different markets with SEO content
  • How does Google deal with your SEO content
  • What type of SEO content writing services I provide
  • How I can help you improve your SEO with my content
  • What is my SEO content writing methodology
  • How much I charge for my SEO content writing services

The list can go on and on.

The problem with the traditional method is that all the blog posts, articles and web pages that you create around your chosen keyword or search term are isolated and scattered. They’re not connected with each other. They’re not part of a cluster. The search engines will crawl them and index them as separate entities.

This sort of content arrangement gets lost in all the hubbub that fills up the Internet.

This sort of content management worked previously because there wasn’t lots of content on the Internet and not many businesses were using content marketing to promote their businesses. Now that content marketing has gone mainstream every business and individual want to use it and hence, your content authority needs to stand out. This you can achieve by creating content clusters, or topic clusters.

The important components of a topic cluster are

  • The web page containing an introduction to the main topic, in my case that would be “SEO content writing services”
  • A cluster of blog posts and webpages – on my website as well as on other websites like Medium, Quora and LinkedIn – that lead to the main web page and to each other

Hence, it becomes a cluster.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is the main web page to which every other web page, blog post and article links. This is the web page or blog post you want to optimize.

As explained above in the topic cluster section, pillar page exists at the center of your topic cluster. It is the main topic you want to cover. Everything else links to it and it links to everything else. It becomes an Oracle of knowledge about the topic or the search term.

How does creating topic clusters and pillar pages improve your search engine rankings?

Search engines like Google are constantly looking for authority content. They want to provide high-quality information to search engine users.

Since search is becoming very complex Google prefers sources that are packed with very useful and relevant information.

The information doesn’t just have to be useful and relevant, it also needs to be arranged in such a manner that it is easier to consume and understand.

Modular information is easier to consume and understand.

When you create topic clusters you create lots of content pieces and then join them around your pillar page. Your pillar page becomes a sort of a hub for all the information relevant to that particular topic.

Creating topic clusters solves two purposes:

  • It makes you write/create/gather lots of information around a single topic covering every possible subtopic
  • It makes it easier for users to navigate through the entire spectrum of the topic through hyperlinks

This further boosts your SEO.

Since all the pages and blog posts are interconnected, even if a single link gets an SEO boost it has a trickle-down effect on all the connected links.

Also, since lots of web pages, blog posts and articles – on your website and outside of your website – are connecting to your pillar page, Google begins to think that it is a very important page about your chosen topic and hence, begins to improve its search engine rankings.

Is there a definitive way of ranking in Google’s featured snippets

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Ranking in Google’s featured snippets is one of the best ways of getting a ton of traffic to your website, provided you get ranked for the right keywords and there is another link of yours appearing somewhere on the same page.

Nobody knows exactly why Google decides to rank your link. I have had some success getting some of my links ranked in this section; for example, look at this:

credible-content-showing-up-in-Google-snippets

This blog post contains lots of statistics and graphs to show how many more links Google has started including in the featured snippets section and how much more traffic these featured links draw from Google compared to those links that are not featured.

What are  upchart showing how many links are included in the featured snippets of Google

Google’s featured snippets

Just like any other content-based platform, Google is constantly coming up with ways to present relevant content attractively as well as purposefully.

Since more than 99% of the times people are asking questions and looking for useful information on Google, it makes sense that when Google feels that a particular answer satisfies a particular question, that answer is featured as a snippet.

As you can see in the above image (from my website), the featured snippet stands out compared to other links on the search results page.

You don’t get snippets all the time. Snippets are usually triggered by queries that contain, “what is”, “how is” or “how much”.

A relevant part of the text is picked from your link and featured in the snippets section. It is like, while analyzing the question asked by the search engine user, Google finds the traces of the right answer on your link, picks up the relevant portion, and then puts it in the featured snippets section.

Many webmasters believe that being featured in Google’s featured snippets can be counter-productive because then the search engine users have no reason to visit the link.

It depends. It can also increase the chances of the search engine users visiting your website more if they like the answer presented in the snippet. A big part of your answer appearing in the snippet also makes a strong impression on search engine users because they think that if Google is highlighting your answer then your link must have relevant information.

Is there a way you can get your links ranked and featured in the Google featured snippets section?

Over the years since Google started featuring links in this section various SEO experts and content marketers have been trying to figure out how to pinpoint the qualities or attributes that get your link featured in the section.

Ahref has done a comprehensive study on how many links are being featured in the snippets section on exactly what are the benefits of getting featured there.

The Ahref study has found that there is a decline in the number of clicks when your link is featured in the snippets section.

image chart showing that the CTR declines for the snippet-featured links

You can see in the above graphic that when a link is featured in the snippets section it gets approximately only 8.6% of clicks but when it is not featured it gets 19.6%.

It proves the apprehension of some webmasters that if your link is listed in the snippets section then people have less motivation to click it because they have already found the information they are looking for.

If I can remember my own search pattern I think I agree with this conclusion. Sometimes when I’m looking for an answer and when I find the answer in the featured snippets section, there is no reason for me to visit the actual link or, it prompts me to visit another link because I don’t seem to be able to find the right answer within the snippet.

But there is another finding in the same above Ahref link: the overall clicks on the remaining links appearing below the featured snippets link tend to fall down.

This might be because Google has become so efficient in digging out the appropriate answer and featuring it on the snippets section that after having viewed the snippet, users have no reason to check the other links.

On the other hand, detailed analysis of Google’s featured snippets on this link shows that if the link that appears in the featured section is followed by another link from your website, the CTR increases tremendously, sometimes by a whopping 516%.

How to make your content appear in the Google’s featured snippets section

Most of the SEO websites suggest that there is no definitive way of ranking in Google’s featured snippets section, but still, there is a pattern that emerges as more and more people study it.

which words in the query make it easier to rank in Google featured snippets section

Personally, I wouldn’t advise you to go crazy about getting your content featured in the snippets section. What matters the most is, what benefit you derive out of the various positions you get on the search engine result page.

Anyway, if you want to get featured there, you should take some clue from the way people ask questions on Quora.

You can follow the same pattern while writing content for your own website.

Create your blog posts, articles and web pages in QA form: ask a question in the title of your link and then provide an answer in the body text.

Remember that Google should be able to find a complete answer to the query submitted by the search engine user. The answer to this query can manifest in the form of

  • A small paragraph that can fit into a snippet
  • A bullet list of different parts of the answer
  • Data presented in a tabular format

As you can see in the featured snippet from my own website, it is a paragraph.

The text taken for the Google’s featured snippet can appear anywhere in your body text. Just make sure that the words contained within the question also appear within the text that you would like to present as a snippet candidate.

Of course, the usual conditions need to exist, such as, you should already be enjoying good or comparatively better search engine rankings. Your links should already be ranking for you to appear in Google’s featured snippets section.

So, if you want to publish content specifically for the featured snippets section, first focus on improving your general SEO

How to write remarkable content for your website

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Write remarkable content for your website

Do you know there is scarcity of good, remarkable content and therefore, there is a big opportunity for you if you can write and publish content on your website or blog?

The success of your website depends on your content.

You get search engine traffic because of your content. Your visitors turn into your paying customers and clients because of your content. People recognize you or your brand on other websites and social networking platforms because of your content.

You can read on this AdWeek link that 90% customers prefer tailored content before they decide to do business with a brand.

Your prospective customers and clients need information before they can decide to buy from you.

They want to familiarize themselves with your business and what you stand for, before they can make up their minds.

Your content allows you to have conversations with your customers and clients.

The more conversations they have with you, the better acquainted they get with you. The better acquainted they get with you, the more eager they are to do business with you in the hour of their need.

But the biggest challenge faced by online entrepreneurs is, creating and publishing good quality, remarkable content.

What is remarkable content?

Remarkable content makes your visitors happy about visiting your website.

Remarkable content should be conversational, to the point, easy-to-read, and helpful. People should be able to find it quickly on your website or blog.

Important attributes of remarkable content

The three attributes of remarkable content are:

  1. Purpose: What purpose does your content solve? Why does it exist? What will your customers and clients achieve after having consumed this particular piece of content? Is it meant to create awareness? Does it educate your visitors? Does it provide them valuable, useful information?
  2. Format: In what format does this particular piece of content exist? Is it a blog post? A web page? A landing page? A white paper? An ebook? A video? Remember that remarkable content exists in a format preferred by your target audience.
  3. Topic: Topic is a somewhat narrower version of the purpose. Whereas the purpose attribute can be applicable to multiple pieces of content on your website or blog, topic is narrower, and is confined to a single link. Does the topic deal with a sales related question? Does it explain something complex and technical? Will your customer be able to achieve a task after going through this particular link?

Whom are you writing for?

Remarkable content is persona-centric. It’s like, when you talk to someone, when you have a conversation with someone, your talk is more meaningful if you know the other person.

This is why creating a persona is very important for writing or creating remarkable content.

Defining a persona helps you write content for a well-defined personality.

How to write remarkable content for your website or blog

Listed below are few points that can help you write remarkable content or at least, keeping these points in mind, you can attempt writing remarkable content for your website or blog.

You don’t necessarily have to stick to these points and even if you pay attention to one or two of these points you will be able to write remarkable content.

Provide solutions to people’s problems

People will love you if you solve their problems.

Your every web page, your every blog post, your every email broadcast should solve some problem.

This is because when people search online, they are constantly looking for solutions to their problems. They always look for information that can help them achieve something. If your content helps them achieve something they like you and remember you and this is how your brand presence becomes stronger.

Present a unique perspective

If you write content that is more or less the same as the others are writing, how do people distinguish you from the others? You have to present a unique perspective. Tell them something that they haven’t yet come across on another website or another blog.

They are on your website because they want to know what’s your take on a particular subject or topic.

Back your claims with credible data

Though personally am not a big fan of throwing around big numbers just to impress people, if you can present some credible data when making claims, it definitely helps.

Telling you that B2B buyers prefer to go through expert content before making a purchase decision might be less convincing than telling you that 96% B2B buyers prefer to go through expert content before making a purchase decision, and then linking to the source of the data.

Write in a conversational manner

Great, well-written content is always conversational.

When you write in a conversational style it seems as if you are talking to people, you are interacting with them, instead of delivering a monologue that is totally uninspiring and emotionless.

Conversational writing makes greater impact. It also engages your audience and encourages people to respond to your content writing.

Publish in a format preferred by your target audience

There was a time when it was mostly text on websites and blogs. Gradually, images came up. Then GIFs. Then videos. Aside from these formats there are slides, presentations, infographics and all sort of other interactive content.

People have different preferences when accessing your content. Although what sort of format people prefer also depends on your niche – people in food and travel industry prefer videos and images and people on Twitter prefer shorter updates, but B2B buyers prefer longer, comprehensive blog posts and articles to get as much information as possible from you.

Some people also like slides and PDFs.

Worried how you would create so much content for different formats?

Normally, content marketers write a blog post and then out of that blog post they repurpose content into various formats. Want to know how you can repurpose your content? Read this: How to repurpose old content.

Make it easy to access and find your content

This is where content marketing plays an important role. Simply publishing high-quality content doesn’t help you much unless you make it easier for people to find your content.

Do the following to make it easier for people to find your content:

  • Search engine optimize your content so that it ranks well and consequently, it’s easier to find them for appropriate search terms.
  • Distribute your content using your social networking profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
  • Encourage other Webmasters and bloggers to link to your quality content.
  • Invest in PPC campaigns.
  • Build and use your mailing list to broadcast to your mailing list subscribers.

It should be your constant effort to write remarkable content for your website because mediocre content, although it’s easier to write or create it, doesn’t help you much. It does not make a positive impact. It doesn’t improve your search engine rankings. It doesn’t improve your conversion rate.

Why isn’t content marketing working for you?

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Why isn't your content marketing working?

No matter how “new age” content marketing may seem to some, it is very hard to make it work for you unless you completely know what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy.

In fact, “strategy” is the keyword here. All those people who say content marketing doesn’t work for them, don’t have a strategy.

They want to benefit from content marketing because they have read or heard about companies and businesses benefiting from content marketing.

There is nothing wrong in wanting to benefit from something the others are benefiting from, it’s just that people want to use content marketing without actually understanding it, and then when it doesn’t work, they are disenchanted.

Why content marketing doesn’t work for some businesses?

Content marketing doesn’t work for some businesses because they carry it out half-heartedly, or they think that it is a template that can be implemented as it is.

They think once they have published 5-10 blog posts it should suffice as content marketing.

Content marketing, contrary to the prevalent belief, is a full-fledged business component.

It is not something that you do just because you want to do it as a novelty.

For example, if you need to have an office or a workplace for your business, there is no other option but to have it.

If you need electricity, then it is not an option.

Some business managers think that content marketing is optional, whereas, it is not.

What is content marketing?

It is, promoting your business on the strength of your content rather than conventional advertising.

Read What is content marketing: 15 definitions from industry experts

Who are more likely to do business with you? People who have come to your website via an advertisement or people who like the content that you publish and distribute regularly?

Obviously, it is the latter.

Your content nurtures familiarity. Your brand becomes recognisable when people come across your content at other places.

Content should be published and distributed for its usefulness and not because you want to cover all your keywords or you want to create an ongoing buzz on your social networking profiles.

It should provide answers to people’s questions.

If your prospective customers and clients have problems regarding your business, your content must provide solutions to those problems.

Your content must be the information they need to be able to decide whether they should do business with you or not.

Your content should help you establish yourself as an authority in your field or profession.

When people consume your content they should be able to make out that you are the right person to seek right information from.

It doesn’t work for some people because they think that content marketing is a one-off activity.

They think that they can start or stop content marketing as and when it is convenient to them.

It doesn’t work that way.

One needs to be consistent otherwise each time you start, you have to start more or less from scratch. When you have to start from scratch repeatedly, you tend to think that it is not working.

For content marketing to work for you, stop thinking that it is an activity that is optional.

Publish useful, high-quality content and then make sure the right audience can access that content not just on your website but also on other websites and social networking platforms. Do this consistently.

Focus on purposefulness and quality.

Don’t publish content just for the heck of it.

Your audience these days accesses content on multiple platforms according to individual preferences of your customers and clients.

Some may prefer your blog, some may prefer Instagram posts, some prefer LinkedIn updates and some would like to interact with you on Facebook.

A good thing about quality content is that it can be repurposed according to the platform you want to use.

The same blog post can be turned into a presentation and hence a YouTube video. You can take out individual points and post them on Instagram. You can post useful paragraphs on Facebook and encourage your contacts to respond.

So basically, content marketing means, constantly communicating to your prospective and present customers and clients in such a manner that it is a fruitful interaction and not one way promotional exercise..

Content marketing always succeeds when you publish useful and relevant content and then use appropriate channels to publish it and distribute it. People will always respond.

If you are regularly interacting with your customers and clients through your blog, online forum, social networking platforms and/or email newsletter, you are already doing content marketing.

Why I’m recommending LongtailPro to my clients

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LongtailPro logo

During the past couple of weeks I’ve been promoting the keyword analysis tool LongtailPro to my clients.

One of my clients suggested that since I’m recommending the link, why don’t I check if they have an affiliate program? If I sign up for that, he would rather subscribe to the service through my LongtailPro affiliate link.

They have an affiliate program. I joined and my client joined LongtailPro through my link.

LongtailPro is one of the first keyword analysis tools I’ve ever used, so may be that’s why I’m all excited about it, but I can see that information it gives you really helps.

As the name suggests, LongtailPro is to be used for analyzing long tail keywords.

It doesn’t just help you find long tail keywords you should optimize your content for, it also tells you whether it’s worth your effort or not.

Before you start creating optimized content for your website or blog, your competitors may have already gotten their links indexed and ranked and it might be very difficult to get good ranking for those keywords.

So, what do you do?

It tells you what low competition alternatives you should try for.

Once you have submitted your URL and the associated keywords it assigns a keyword competitiveness number to your website and individual keywords.

If the keyboard competitiveness of your keyword is less than or equal to 30 then it is considered a less comparative keyword, which further means that it is easier to rank for that keyword.

LongtailPro data chart

As the number moves up it is more difficult to rank at the moment and it won’t be productive to focus your energy and resources on those keywords.

Then, as more and more of your content begins to appear for less competitive keywords in the search engine result pages, your keyword competitiveness improves and you can begin to target more competitive keywords.

It uses the search engine data from Google and the AdWords keyword analysis tool to suggest further long tail keywords from your individual keywords.

That is, when you supply the software with your seed keyword (mine, for example, is “content writing services”) it takes out all the combinations of various search terms people use related to this seed keyword.

For me, the best use of LongtailPro is that it tracks the rankings of my various keywords in real time and it gives me a long list of less competitive keywords to work on for the time being.

It updates this data every 16-20 hours.

Whether you are tracking 2 keywords, 20 keywords or 120 keywords, you can check every day how your website is ranking for those keywords. Manually, it would be a herculean task.

It also tells you how much traffic individual keywords are drawing.

There are many keyword analysis and tracking tools available and I am pretty sure they are great.

I have started using LongtailPro because for the time being it is giving me the data that I need to optimize for various keywords.

Also, I feel it is not overpriced.

Initially you can go for the monthly subscription package so that if you don’t like it you can unsubscribe after a month.

They also have a free trial but right now, at the time of writing this, some Black Friday promotional campaign is going on so I couldn’t find information on the trial period but they do provide it.

As a content writer and a content marketer I also like the way they use educational content to make sure people are able to use their keyword analysis tool properly.

Many people stop using a tool because they cannot make out how to optimally use it. They don’t get the desired results and after a while, they lose interest, despite the fact that the features they need are right there.

LongtailPro has lots of YouTube videos and blog posts explaining how you can find low-competition keywords for your niche and start optimizing your website.

They are continuously sending you emails prompting you to make use of their tool and increase your search engine rankings.

I think this is a good post-sale content marketing example. Recently I wrote The benefits of writing content for existing customers.

Here is my link if you want to sign up for LongtailPro.