For years and years, inbound marketing and SEO strategies have been based around individual keywords. But user behavior and the way search engines work are constantly changing. The result is that we have to rethink the way we organize our content.
In this "new era", individual pages organized around one keyword won’t cut it - It’s time to start focusing on pillar pages and topic clusters with links between them. More than one specific term, what matters now is correctly organizing the content according to thematic areas. Ready to give your website a spin? We tell you how to in this guide.
The way users search for information has changed, and consequently so has the way SEOs and bloggers create content. Let's take a look at the main changes and their impacts.
Typically, keyword-based strategies typically use one- or two-word search terms (e.g., "restaurants"). But according to HubSpot, currently, 64% of searches have 4 words or more (e.g. "Japanese restaurants near me"). The searches are becoming longer and more conversational, and they seek to obtain very specific information.
In part, this is due to the boom of voice searches. Today, thanks to Siri and Google Assistant, 20% of Google mobile searches are made by voice.
But that's not the only reason. Another thing to keep in mind is that nowadays users have access to a lot of content, and there is usually more quantity than quality. Because of this, users make more detailed searches to better filter the results and get the data they need faster.
On the other hand, it is more and more frequent to "browse" the content, based on article headers or Google's highlighted information to solve the doubt that initiated the search.
Google's algorithms are constantly evolving to provide the best possible response to user searches. For example, Google is now able to interpret a search based on its overall meaning rather than on individual words and employs automatic learning strategies to interpret specific terms more accurately.
The result of all this is that Google provides the most accurate information possible in response to a search, even if the keyword does not correspond exactly to what the user has searched for. This implies that inbound marketers have to create content focused on needs and not simply on keywords. That's why the new model is based on creating articles on long tail keywords linked together and around a central hub so that we cover as many searches as possible around a particular topic.
To help users find the information they are looking for on our website and to help search engines index us correctly, the solution is to use a topic cluster model. Choose the topics which you want to position for, create content based on keywords related to the topics and link them together. This structure is based on 3 key components: pillar pages, clusters, and links.
Image Source: HubSpot
Many SEO experts believe that the end of keyword dominance has come and content clusters are emerging as a vital factor for ranking in Google.
As a result, marketers and SEO specialists have started to propose possible content clustering ideas. Hubspot was the first to experiment with fruitful thematic clusters in 2016 and found that the higher the number of internal links, the better the placement in SERPs. The findings of this experiment opened a new horizon in the world of SEO.
With the latest updates to its algorithm announced in June 2021, Google explained that it will now take into account the user experience of a web page in order to rank it. The key on-page experience metric for marketers will be the Core Web Vitals, which measure the quality of a website in terms of user experience. You can check them out in Search Console's "Core Web Metrics" report.
A pillar page is long-form piece of content that is used to give a broad explanation of a certain topic, allowing other sub-topics, or topic clusters, to connect back to it. Pillar pages briefly cover all the main aspects of the topic on a single page. You can then create more detailed blog posts or articles that delve into more specific topics and link them to the pillar page.
Pillar pages talk about a topic in a general way and the cluster content covers related topics more in-depth. For example, you could write a pillar page about content marketing and a cluster of content about blogs. You could even go a step further and create secondary clusters, for example, an article about guest blogging or another one about choosing the best images for your blog.
Pillar pages are longer than typical blog articles, as they cover all aspects of the topic you want to position yourself for, but they don't go into as much detail. The idea is that the pillar page gives a quick answer to questions about a particular topic, allowing you to go deeper through the linked article.
Pillar pages can be very different depending on the theme they cover, and there is plenty of room for creativity. But to give you an idea, let's quickly look at the 3 most commonly used pillar pages according to HubSpot
To create a pillar page, the first step is to stop thinking of your website as a collection of keywords and start focusing on the topics you want to position yourself for. Once you are clear on what they are, make a list of ideas for articles based on more specific keywords that relate to the main theme.
For this strategy to work, the topics on your pillar pages need to be well-defined. They should be broad enough to allow for multiple clusters, but not so broad that they cannot be covered in a single page.
Pillar pages should answer a user's main questions about a topic so that they are encouraged to click on it when entering a related search term. Then, if they want to go deeper, they can click on one of the links on the pillar page to access a cluster of content.
If you have HubSpot, this video will walk you through how to build and organize a Pillar Page and Topic Cluster within the platform.
Topic clusters are pages that dive deeper into the topics mentioned in a pillar page. Normally, clusters have the format of blog articles, but that's not the only option: they can also be an infographic, a video, or even a podcast.
Normally, each cluster will be organized around the main keyword, but the most important thing is that it really solves the user's problems and provides useful content.
For this pillar content-cluster content structure to make sense for users and search engines, it is essential that it is correctly linked. Links pass authority from one page to another and allow users to navigate through them.
There are different ways to approach the link structure of a pillar page and its clusters, but the basic thing is that the pillar page links to each of the main clusters and these back to the pillar page. In addition, we must introduce links between clusters, especially when they solve closely related issues.
To conclude, let's look at some recommendations to put all this information into practice and restructure your website to adapt to the new SEO standards.