What exactly is a topic cluster, and how can it be used to improve a company’s organic SEO?

Businesses, especially e-commerce companies, can often find that online competition in SEO is fierce.

Therefore, when you market your goods or services nationally, it’s often hard to compete with larger businesses. The larger online retailers might have considerably more to spend on their digital marketing.

For example, at the national level, you could quite easily be competing with hundreds upon hundreds of competitors who are actively investing in their SEO each month.

Perhaps sometimes pouring tens of thousands into their digital marketing every single month?

So, how do you stand out in this competitive marketplace?

By being an expert and in a set niche

The truth is, when you’re competing nationally, you’re competing against many competitors, and you need to be laser-focused on who the customer actually is.

Then, instead of casting your net too wide and falling short of attracting any customers at all, you can focus on niches.

 

Topic clusters and pillar pages

This is where using topic clusters and pillar pages come into their own. This is rather fancy marketing language way of saying: pick an area of your business, in terms of products and services that you want to be more visible for on Google and in the LLM’s.

If you are an online retailer of, say, jewellery items, then you might want to become an expert on a certain type of diamond engagement rings.

Then create a main page, a pillar page, and the main page you want to funnel visitors to- spend time ensuring that the pillar page is able to convert therefore has been designed with CRO in mind. Then you can create topic clusters that answer commonly asked questions that surround central theme of product or service that you want to sell more of.

Then use internal links, and also images as links, to send and direct organic visitors from Google to that cluster content page and then onto the pillar page.

The pillar pages’ purpose is to convert, which, again, is rather fancy marketing talk, for getting the customer to flip open their purse or wallet and make a purchase!

If you’re seen as the expert on the topic, you will be more trusted (Google EEAT)

A key aspect of SEO is now Google EEAT.

We would argue that this should be the central focus of any digital marketing team.

The reason we say this is simple: you can improve your organic SEO, but at the same time, this work will be read by LLMs as well, which means the content marketing could also be cited in, say, ChatGPT, Perplexity or in Google AI Overviews if the work is good quality.

Granular pages that help a customer answer commonly asked questions

Your customers will often have similar questions that they ask before purchasing a product.

These questions often move the customer along the buying journey.

For example, let’s return to our diamond engagement ring example: the query may start with “How much does a diamond engagement ring cost?”

The question asked closer to the time of making a purchase may centre on how to determine whether the diamond’s clarity is good and whether it is of good quality diamond or not.

Again, this is where Google EEAT, pillar content, and topic clusters come into their own—the purpose is to answer as many commonly asked questions about a product or service as possible.

As well as directing that shopper to the pillar page after you have satisfied their question. Then they may be more likely to purchase directly from you if you directly answer their query.

 

Granular pages

These pages, blog posts, or, as some businesses call them, articles, answer a question in depth.

 

Most SEO agencies call this helpful content.

Remember that Google rolled out a large algorithm update, called the “Google Helpful Content Update”.

Basically businesses which wrote content marketing which was written to help shoppers, that was written primarily to answer a question, ranked higher on Google. The pages which were just written for pure SEO benefit, and didn’t answer the question as well, these pages moved down in Google’s SERPs.

Therefore content that’s well written, that’s helpful, that’s not just written for SEO benefit does rank higher on Google.

Basically, if you really and truly go the extra mile to help your customers, to guide them, to educate them, to be as helpful as possible, you will be rewarded with ranking higher in Google’s organic SERP’s.

 

How pillar content and content clusters support improved organic SEO

When you create a helpful piece of content marketing, such as a helpful content cluster or a pillar page, you can also gain these positive knock-on effects:

It can result in higher organic rankings on Google for that topic you’re covering

 

More widely cited in the LLM’s

Higher dwell times, as you’re bringing in shoppers who want to find an answer to a very precise question

You can improve your business’s Google EEAT score, which means the website can rank higher across the board for range of different keywords

You can gain more backlinks

You can lower the bounce rate

 

Become the experts in a niche and rank higher for these keywords

Clever businesses understand that sometimes they can’t compete with huge UK businesses, perhaps with multi-million-pound budgets.

But what they can do is become the experts in a niche.
As Googlebot indexes more and more quality work around a given topic, Google’s algorithm starts to understand that you’re the experts in that niche.

That you’re the experts on say diamond engagement rings.

This does take a lot of time to show Google that you’re the experts at that particular service or product. However, imagine how valuable it is to a business, such as high-street jewellers to emerge as the experts on a particular subject, such as diamond rings right across the U.K.

Then you can rank higher on Google for more relevant keywords relating to diamond rings. You can rank higher on Google for potentially many long-tail keywords by basically becoming the expert on that product or service.

However, this does not happen overnight; it takes many, many months to achieve.

 

More on Google EEAT

In your written work, you therefore need to demonstrate that you have real expertise and experience in terms of what you are writing about.

SEO experts refer to this as Google EEAT.
The first two E’s are about demonstrating experience and expertise.

 

Write what you’re passionate about

It’s important to target a keyword because you feel that it would be commercially advantageous to your business.

Although that’s a good idea, you do have to think about how effective you are at writing content marketing, which could gain a very high

Google EEAT score; you have to show you have in-depth knowledge on that product or service for a long period.

Google will use its Google Knowledge Vault, as well as Google Knowledge Graph, to understand what it is you’re stating and whether it’s factually correct.

Therefore, it’s best to write on a subject that you are an absolute expert on.

There won’t just be one blog post; sometimes it’s necessary to write hundreds of high-quality pieces.
So make sure you choose a topic where you have a strong expertise.

 

Is there enough search volume?

What you have to remember is, you could be the experts on a subject, but is there enough of a market?

You may want to specialise in a group or single product or service; however, you should conduct keyword research to understand whether there’s enough search volume.

If not enough people are searching for answers, products or services in that area, then you might want to choose another area for your content marketing, because you might not gain enough sales if the product or service is too niche. There’s not enough of a market potentially.

 

Keep the work up to date.

It’s important from time to time to set aside a few moments to check whether that content marketing is up to date.

 

Hire us as a marketing agency with heaps of experience

We are one of Wales most knowledgeable and most established SEO companies.

For a free quote, why not contact one of the team today?