Your business content marketing will be more effective if you follow a topic cluster strategy
A topic cluster is the grouping of some of your content into a main topic, so that all your material is organised into a few topics and there are no articles outside of them.
In other words, a set of themes is a selection of topics on which the articles belonging to your marketing strategy are focused. Therefore, each post of your blog would be linked to one of those topics, which should be related to your brand's business sector and its products or services. Remember that the goal is to make your visitors look as much like your buyer persona as possible.
Thematic relevance is more important than quantity of content
Writing keyword-driven content is an outdated technique: the important thing now is to focus on general topics and create articles about them. This does not mean that you should forget to set keywords in your blog posts or that you should not create as much content as possible to increase the chances of your target audience finding you. What it does mean is that, in order for constant content creation to be effective, it must follow a strategy that focuses on quality and topical relevance.
The immense amount of information on the Internet makes Google's algorithm increasingly complex, but also more effective for users. Thus, the search engine analyses and interprets the context of the content to offer the most accurate results. Therefore, an article could appear in a search if it responds to the query made, even if it does not include in its title or development the exact words typed by the user in the navigation bar (also known as query).
For this reason, the goal of your content strategy should be to combine the needs of search engines like Google and the needs of your potential customers, and not just one of the two. It is true that your content is aimed at users because they are the ones who can become future customers, but without a proper presence in search engines it will be very difficult to reach them.
Advantages of incorporating topic sets
Adapting your content marketing strategy to the current requirements of search engines offers many benefits for your business. Let's take a look at some of them:
- focuses the creation of content. Classification by topic helps the planning of your strategy in the long term. In this way, it facilitates the work of the professionals in charge of the campaign and focuses their field of action, which avoids straying from the objectives set out in the first place.
- target your potential customers: the topics on which your content focuses should be closely related to your business, so that visitors to your website will be people interested in your sector and, most likely, in the products and services you offer.
- improve the SEO positioning of your blog. Topic sets generate topical relevance, which is one of the best techniques at the moment to position your articles in search engines. This way, if Google considers that your blog focuses its activity on specific topics, it will be more likely to appear on the first page of results.
- it makes it easier to design your web architecture, so you could create a section or blog for each general topic, with content grouped into different pillar pages.
Steps to create a topic set
Creating a theme set is a job that requires a lot of perseverance and patience because it offers long-term benefits, but the steps involved in creating a theme set show that it is not a complicated task:
- choose the main topics. To do this, think about the topics in which your company can position itself as a benchmark and which have the potential to attract your buyer personas. Think about two- or three-word concepts that get a high volume of web searches and create slightly more specific topics that help to contextualise it. For example, if you want to position yourself in "inbound marketing", one of the topics could be "content strategy in inbound marketing".
- establish subtopics: To do this, put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers and think about what queries they might ask online about your main topics. Consider their problems, doubts, questions... It might help to talk to your company's team to find out about these questions. Following the example above, a subtopic for " inbound marketing content strategy" could be "article writing tips". As you can see, these are concrete titles that answer a specific question. In this sense, thinking about the 5Ws (what, who, when, where and why) can help you establish subtopics. You can also take a look at our article on how and where to generate content ideas.
- create pillar pages that link to subtopics. A pillar page is a general information hub within your website about a main topic. So, you could create a pillar page titled " inbound marketing content strategy". Inside, users should find a complete guide to the topic where each section is briefly developed. This is because on this page you should create hyperlinks to the subtopics you have published, offering internet users the possibility to expand the information. And the same goes the other way around: remember to link all articles on a topic to its pillar page. This way, Google will understand that your blog includes quality and specialised content on that topic, which will improve your SEO positioning. If you want, you can check this HubSpot pillar page to get a practical idea of how it works.
With these three steps and a lot of energy, you can create sets of topics to be more present in search results, reach a wider audience, optimise your content marketing strategy and increase your number of customers. Are you going to miss this opportunity?
