The most important method to stay relevant for search engines is to regularly publish new and valuable content on your website. Naturally, you optimize your texts for related keywords, provide images with alt texts and share the content on social networks. This way your website remains attractive to visitors and you maintain or obtain a high position in the search results.
With the increasing amount of content being published, there is also a risk lurking. At a certain point, the user (and therefore also Google) can no longer see the wood for the trees on your website. He can no longer clearly see which content is really relevant and which is not. Due to the increasing amount of content, your page rank is also distributed tens or hundreds of times over all underlying pages. Final score: all your SEO efforts lose their effectiveness and your position in the search results deteriorates.
The solution: Topic Clusters
With Topic Clusters you bring structure back to your website and make it easier for the user to navigate through your website. By properly organizing your (long tail) articles around one topic, Google better understands which content is related to each other. By correctly placing back links between articles, Google also better sees the relationship and kinship between articles and keywords. And that in turn leads to better indexation in the search engine.
This is briefly how you can get started with Topic Clusters today
- Determine the most important topics of your website.
- Determine what the cornerstone content is of each topic. This will be the so-called “pillar page” of your topic cluster.
- Determine which content is related to the pillar page. This is often the long tail content (very specific).
- Make sure your pillar page is accessible from the homepage.
- Link from the pillar page to the related articles and back. Consistently use the same keywords in the links.
Check out the video below that shows the basics of Topic Clusters:
How HubSpot successfully uses Topic Clusters to stay one step ahead of the competition
One of the shining examples that shows the successful use of Topic Clusters is HubSpot's blog. HubSpot is a major player in the field of marketing automation software. HubSpot's content team spends an enormous amount of time creating and publishing content on their blog. At the same time, the team realized that creating some content was aimless. Content was created for the sake of creating content. There was no clear purpose per article and there was a large overlap between all content.
Time for change, time for effective SEO through Topic Clusters.
Watch the (SUPER FAST) talk by Leslie Ye, marketing manager at HubSpot, below. She explains in great detail how they used Topic Clusters on the HubSpot blog.
Stay one step ahead of your competitors: improve your position in the search engines
Van Ons is happy to help, think and participate with you to maintain and structurally improve your position in the search engines. We can help you structure existing content, present the content better on your website and implement Topic Clusters for you. Call the office on 020 331 81 77, ask for Jeffrey, Marcel or Dennis and take the first step towards strengthening your SEO strategy.