If you are in search of a new way to improve your website’s rankings in major search engines in 2019, start utilizing topic clusters.
What is a Topic Cluster?
A topic cluster is a specially-designed strategy that is done in order to optimize the overall virtual architecture of your website, assist search engines in discovering new pages, and to help in the process of improving website rankings.
Generally speaking, the art of creating topic clusters is not new.
Websites such as HubSpot have been creating these clusters for years; however, there is now a new focus on topic clusters due to the fact that it helps provide quality to a content marketing campaign and stresses the overall importance of internal linkage.
How Does a Topic Cluster Work?
Each cluster initiates with a main pillar page. In terms that are understood among today’s website owners and content marketers, this main page acts as a “hub” for a topic. Then, a variety of new content pages are created that relate to the topic on the hub page.
These pages link back to that main page.
Additionally, they link to one another. By performing these linking measures, all of the major search engines view the main page as the “authority”. As time progresses, that page – as well as the content pages connected to it through internal links – start to rank higher among search engines.
How to Create Topic Clusters
Now that you have a basic idea of what a topic cluster is and how it works, it is time to start the process of creating your own topic clusters. The following steps will help in this process:
- Identify the Main Topic – You need to consider the products and/or services that your company offers or specializes. Then, create a theme that is relatively broad. Once you create a theme, you are ready for the next step.
- Create the Main Page – Now, you are ready to create the main page of your virtual “hub”. You will want to create some type of comprehensive guide or provide informative information about the theme. When creating this page, be sure to incorporate some way to enhance your conversion rate. You may want to offer a free product, include a poll, or offer visitors the opportunity to provide their email address. Be certain to include links to the subtopic pages of your topic cluster – if they have already been prepared and published.
- The Subtopic Pages – Next create detailed content associated with the theme and topic of your topic cluster. It is important to narrow down the information contained on these pages and make them more specific.
- Time to Link – Once all of your pages are ready, it is time to publish and then take those links and link to all of the other pages within the cluster.
Essentially, topic clusters help you to create linking architectures that increase the page rank of each page on your website.
This is THE best way to optimize your rankings in 2019.