I just checked my old email inbox that I used to use around 2010. In 2011, they were just in the process of launching Grammarly and one of their representatives had filled up my contact form inviting me to write a review for their writing tool in exchange for a three-month Grammarly subscription.

Through the email thread it isn’t clear whether I actually wrote the review or not – in a couple of years I had to take down my old website because another website had completely hijacked my content and due to that, my search engine rankings had dropped to 0.

I don’t have much problem with grammar and I’m not their ideal customer, nonetheless, a few times I have tried to use their service but have always found it a bit expensive, especially for my limited needs.

But that’s another story.

Here is a nice analysis of how Grammarly uses content marketing to attract 41.46 million monthly visitors to its website. The writer of this blog post says that Grammarly uses strategically connected content clusters.

What are content clusters? It is the grouping of multiple web pages and blog posts under one primary topic.

So, you create a blog post briefly explaining the main topic, and then for all the related subtopics you write separate blog posts and then link to those blog posts from the main blog post.

Why content clusters help?

Content clusters are good for conversion rate as well as search engine rankings.

Why content clusters are good for conversion rate?

Around 50% B2B buyers prefer to read 3-5 content pieces before they make a buying decision. Normally they read a blog post or a web page. Then they navigate to another website. Then you again make an effort to bring them back to your website. This goes on multiple times. Most of the times they lose the track.

When you create a content cluster, they are immediately exposed to all the relevant content pieces. Whatever they need to read before deciding, it’s right in front of them. You don’t have to get them to your website multiple times, wasting your own time and resources.

Why content clusters are good for your SEO?

Google evaluates your rankings on the basis of the relevance and comprehensiveness of your content as well as the way people react to your content. When you create content clusters you already create comprehensive content.

If people find your link on Google, go to your website and then leave your website to carry on with the search, Google assumes they didn’t find the information they were looking for and hence you shouldn’t be ranking for the search term used. Your ranking for that keyword or search term is lowered.

Conversely, upon finding your link on Google, when people click it, go to your website and then spend some time exploring your website and going through additional links, Google assumes that your website contains relevant information and consequently, improves your rankings for that keyword or search term

Coming back to Grammarly…

The SaaS company knows that it is a service for writers or people who take their writing seriously whether they are scholars, writers or business persons. Consequently, there is lots of written content on their blog. The above-linked blog post says that Grammarly has 2100 content pieces on its blog.

On second thought, 2100 content pieces isn’t much for a company with a valuation of 100-US$ 500 million (source), but still, it is enough content to make it into a content marketing powerhouse, especially when the content pieces are strategically grouped together in the form of logical content clusters.