It wasn’t long ago that you would type something like “Johannesburg restaurant” into Google. Nowadays, you can type something like “Where should I go for dinner?” into Google. This is because we have started to assume that search engines are smart enough to recognise intent.
The question is: does your SEO strategy reflect this changing search behaviour? This is what the “topic cluster model” is all about. Topic clusters is an SEO strategy that focuses on topics as opposed to keywords. There are a few key benefits of including topic clusters into your SEO and content marketing strategies:
- Improve your website’s architecture
- Make it easier for Google to recognise related content
- Boost your search engine visibility
Consider how the average website works. You start with a home page and eventually launch a blog. Keyword research will show you that there are thousands of long tail keywords related to your products and services. What happens is that you start writing post after post about the same thing. At the end of the day, your website’s content becomes repetitive, loaded and disorganised.
In the topic cluster model, you will have one longer piece of content that broadly outlines the topic. Then, you write content that is related to specific search terms within the longer page so that you can link back to the main article. This way, when one page performs well the entire topic cluster will get a boost.
SEO is all about helping web crawlers make connections. Topic clusters signal to Google that there is a semantic relationship between the content and that you are a trusted authority on the topic.
Need help with your SEO or content marketing strategy? Then contact WSI OMS today.