To have a strong, successful content strategy in place, you must also have a strong, successful SEO strategy in place; the two go hand-in-hand.
After all, there isn’t much point to putting a lot of effort into your content strategy if no one is able to find what you’ve written.
While there are a lot of different ways someone can find your content, overwhelmingly, the best, most ideal way is through an organic search result. Organic search traffic helps you build your reach so more people will see your content and often discover you, your brand, and your business for the first time in a positive way.
That’s where building a topic cluster strategy comes in.
As part of your SEO strategy, having a topic cluster strategy in place is one of the most effective ways to plan, build, and optimize your content to be found in search results, in addition to helping you establish trust and build authority with your target audience.
A topic cluster strategy is really just a way of organizing your content strategy to make it more effective, deliberate, authoritative, and relative to a search result.
And it’s a pivotal part of a modern, successful SEO strategy right now, at this moment in time.
★ Want to learn more about building an SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
A topic cluster strategy is made up of 3 components:
- Your Pillar Page, which is a longer, more comprehensive, primary content page.
- Your Cluster Content, which are the supporting blog posts that build on and are related to the pillar page.
- The Hyperlinks, that link your cluster content back to your pillar page.
➤ If you want to learn more about pillar pages, have a look at this post.
Most people will take the approach of writing a single blog post about a topic, and then move onto a new, unrelated one; but when you’re building a topic cluster strategy, your focus is instead on creating multiple pieces of supportive content around the same or similar primary topic.
For example, let’s say you wanted to build authority, and rank in search results more effectively, for topics related to selling your parent’s home, you could just write a post called: What to Know When Selling Your Parent’s Home, post it, and be done with it.
Or, if you’re building out the same topic as part of a topic cluster strategy, you could:
- Write an 8-12 blog posts about topics all related to selling your parent’s home (your cluster content)
- Write a long, comprehensive post called: Everything You Need to Know About Selling Your Parent’s Home (your pillar page)
- Create hyperlinks from your cluster content to your pillar page, and vice versa (to work correctly, they must be linked to each other)
By taking this approach, you’ve created a lot more opportunity for yourself: instead of just displaying in a search result for the 1 blog post you wrote, you can display in search results for 10+ search terms and topics all related to a main, overall topic you want to rank for, like selling your parent’s home.
Although it’s a lot more work to do, it’s worth it as part of establishing a strong SEO strategy for a lot of reasons, but primarily, building your content out this way makes your pillar page (and your content strategy in general) more authoritative, both to your target audience and to Google.
Why?
It shows them both that you have a lot of useful, purposeful content that’s relevant to a specific topic, and that you’re an expert on it.
For your audience, structuring your content this way works towards building your expertise in a specific niche. Think about it, if you were looking for a real estate agent to help you with selling your parent’s home, would you work with just a general agent a friend recommended? Or would you work with a well-respected, professional agent that you discovered online that has multiple pieces of content to back up their years of helping people in your exact same situation?
And for Google, structuring your content this way makes it easier for Google to understand the hierarchy of your content strategy, improves your rankings and creates a lot more opportunities for you to display in search result, and helps you to prove your area of expertise to search engines.
★ Want to learn more about building a content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Building and Managing a Real Estate Content Lifecycle Plan
As an agent, there’s no shortage of topic clusters to build on, primarily because agents have so many different people that make up their target audiences, each with different needs and different opportunities for success.
By creating a topic cluster strategy that focuses on the types of people, situations, or areas you want to work in, you’ll be building a solid content and SEO strategy that works towards helping you get the types of quality leads you actually want.
Want to improve your content strategy? Download our Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has practical methods on how to plan, implement, market, and audit a successful real estate content strategy that will deliver results as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
