If you have ever wondered how people land on the first page of the Google search page for a topic, or are a little more advanced and still struggling with SEO, I am here to introduce to something that is the key! It is called content clustering. If you aren’t familiar with content clustering, this post is for you!

What Is Content Clustering?

The idea is to decide on 4-5 main “pillars” of content for your blog. Then, you are able to create a batch of content clustered around that “pillar” or topic. For example- let’s take a beauty blogger. You could maybe have HAIR, MAKEUP, SKINCARE & FASHION.

“Clustered” with each pillar/topic you create a batch of content. So again, we will use the beauty blogger example from above, the “clustered” content looks something like this:

HAIR

• Hairstyles
• Tutorials
• Products
• Tools
• Tips & Tricks
• Hair Types

MAKEUP

• Looks
• Tutorials
• Products
• Tools
• Tips & Tricks

SKINCARE

• Skin Types
• Products
• Common Problems
• Best Practices
• Tools

FASHION

• Summer
• Fall
• Winter
• Spring
• Shoes
• Accessories

You can see another example in my image below. This time using my own site as an example. An interesting thing about these pillars, is that they can be determined at the very beginning of your journey, or they will tend to naturally grow as you start to become more focused on certain topics.

Why Should You Use Content Clustering?

Content clustering is a great system for both you AND your audience. When done properly it will organize your content into a more user friendly experience. It will also help establish you as an “expert” in those things, you know, the go-to person.

What it does for you is allow you to focus your content on specific areas. Instead of looking at this vast sea of topics, you can choose 4- pillars, with 5 sub-topics under it and write at least one post from there. Just to get started. This can also help you batch your content creation. As you continue to create content it is a great road map of the content you want to make, basically creating an editorial calendar.

This is not only more efficient and easier, but it will also help you get noticed by the search engine machines, crawling through content and looking for those sites that really focus on whatever keyword someone might be googling. If you want to be the person best known for makeup, you are going to be writing several posts under those makeup subheadings and linking back to that makeup page pillar. You will want to link to the other makeup pages as well when appropriate. Proper internal linking, when done correctly is similar to a spider-web. Make sure you are using proper categories and tags on these pages and posts as well.

If you have been creating content for a while and would like to really hone in on the benefits of content clustering and SEO you will also want to employ using proper categories and tags. This also makes it easy for your audience to find the content they are looking for on your site. Which is a win-win situation.

Well friends, that is content clustering in a nutshell. Are you going to implement it in your website/online business?

– Michelle

For more information to rock your biz, make sure to check out the Michelle Gifford podcast on iTunes and SoundCloud!