As always, your approach to every SEO challenge must start with carefully selected keyword phrase targets based on achievability, volume and commercial relevance.
This should be quickly followed by a robust and smart content strategy, preferably built from the top down around Topic (or Content) Clusters.
What’s a Topic Cluster when it’s at home?
Glad you asked. Well the first thing to say is this … if you really want to know the in’s and out’s of Topic Clusters then the nice people at Hubspot have done it in a lot more detail than I intend to here. So you may want to read their post. But briefly, for each keyphrase that you will target (ie the main SEO phrase objective) you design a content hub based around that phrase, with a series of article spokes for closely related, long-tail phrase variants of the target terms. The more authority you require, the more significant the cluster that you will need to build. As you create the content resource within your site, ensure that all of your spokes link to the main cluster page.
Changing user behavior has resulted in a dramatic change in emphasis within the Google ranking algorithm over the last 18 months. Older, disguised and fragmented keyword-based search queries have been replaced by more complex questions and search engines are smart enough to understand the difference.
Algorithms can understand topical context and deliver web pages that are more relevant than ever before. Topic Clusters of heavily interlinked content are the perfect way to support Google’s efforts to improve the relevance of search results for the new generation of queries.
So shifting from your traditional website navigation hierarchy to topic clusters will deliver a modern content structure that makes your intended specialist subject areas (aka SEO target phrases) clear to the search engines.
