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What Are Topic Clusters and Why Should You Care?

Written by James Parsons • Updated February 1, 2025

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What Are Topic Clusters and Why Should You Care

Trends come and go in content marketing. Often, a trend isn’t even something new; it’s something we’ve all been doing, or doing off and on, with a new name and a new tool circulating to rebrand it. Some of them are flashes in a pan, while others are more enduring.

Today, I want to talk about topic clusters, one of those relatively recent “trends” that is really just assigning a name and a bit of intentionality to a marketing strategy you’ve probably been using without realizing it. I think it’s one of the most important things you can do in content marketing – and it’s something Topicfinder can help you do – so I want to talk about it in greater detail.

What are Topic Clusters and How Do They Work?

A topic cluster, also known as a content cluster, is a group of pieces of content that are related to one another and all tie back into a central “core” of the cluster. That core is generally referred to as a pillar page.

Generally, a topic cluster includes:

  • A central pillar page, which targets a high-value keyword. This is usually a short-tail keyword, something you might not be able to rank for with a single piece of content but which is important enough to your brand that you want to rank for it anyway.
  • A series of cluster pages, which are pieces of content that target long-tail keywords that are related to the pillar topic page. Each of these pages will link to the pillar page with internal links. Sometimes, they can interlink, or they can link to multiple pillar pages, but the cluster map is often more starkly defined.
  • Sometimes, a cluster will include secondary clusters and tertiary clusters. In these cases, your primary pillar page is surrounded by both cluster pages and sub-pillar pages that themselves have clusters. This is a more advanced mapping strategy, though, and isn’t as common when discussing topic clusters in general.

It really just comes down to content and links, as it is with any good content marketing strategy. Content clusters give you fodder you can use in advertising, social media promotion, outreach, expertise- and brand-building efforts, and all sorts of secondary value, but the core concept of content clustering consists of concise, creative, and constant creation of compelling content.

What are Topic Clusters and How Do They Work

One thing I want to note here is the structure and its similarity to something you may have encountered before. When you think of a central value page, or “money page,” and a series of spokes outward where other pages are created to point at the central money page, you might think of things like link wheels, microsites, and PBNs.

The truth is, these are extremely similar. The biggest difference between the two is that with content clustering, it all happens on your site and domain. With exploitative and gray-hat strategies like link wheels and PBNs, it’s happening across domains, often in ways that the people doing it try to hide the connection from Google.

To be clear, despite the similarity in structure, PBNs are often prohibited and deindexed by Google, while content clusters are valued by Google.

For a theoretical example of a content cluster, you might have:

  • A pillar page targeting a top-level keyword like “Best Athletic Shoes.”
  • A series of cluster pages targeting related keywords, such as:
    • Best Shoes for Hiking
    • Best Shoes for Running
    • Best Shoes for Sports
    • Waterproof Outdoor Shoes
    • Most Durable Athletic Shoes
    • Athletic Shoe Insoles

All of these subpages link back to the primary guide to athletic shoes, and often, that main pillar page also links out to the subpages as “read more” resources.

What Value Can Topic Clusters Give You?

Topic clusters are two things.

First, they’re a structural way to increase the value of each individual piece of content you create by bringing them together with a synergistic effect.

Second, they’re a way to add intentionality to what you’ve likely already been doing in a more haphazard way.

You already probably cover main topics and subtopics, right? It’s just kind of how we all naturally think about content. Most bloggers aren’t just generating a list of keywords and running through them like a checklist, after all. We try to think of topics that are interesting, relevant, and related to our niches and industries.

Topic clustering gives you a format you can use to do all of that more intentionally. It can also help you fill in gaps in your marketing and even build confidence in your expertise. The tangible benefits are numerous, actually.

You gain better keyword optimization.

The actual utilization of keywords is something we all have different views on. Some people are very persistent about using specific keywords a specific number of times in each piece of content. Some write more based on vibes and trust Google’s language processing to handle the rest. Most of us are somewhere in between.

You gain better keyword optimization

What a lot of us tend to forget is that keyword optimization isn’t just relevant to individual pieces of content; it’s also important across the whole of your site. The keywords you use – and the ones you don’t – drive how well Google views your site across different industries and cross-sections of audiences.

With topic clustering, you spend more time and effort looking at keywords across your site and how you use them. I often find that people get into ruts and habits, and they have big blind spots for important keywords they should be using, and they overuse other keywords. Topic clustering helps you even it all out.

You build more and better internal links.

Internal linking is very important. The more internal links you have – as long as they’re relevant, in-content links, not just lists of stuff in footers and sidebars – the better off your pages will be.

You build more and better internal links

Google also loves it when you use internal links. The search engines themselves can get all of your page information from your sitemap, but they like to be able to discover it naturally through crawling. More importantly, Google puts a huge amount of emphasis on designing your pages and content for people, not for the bots, and internal links help people navigate your site more easily.

You can implement a more defined sales funnel by sculpting your internal traffic.

The links you choose to implement – and the ones you choose to leave out – help you control the flow of traffic on your site.

You can implement a more defined sales funnel by sculpting your internal traffic

With topic clustering, you can see what pages people land on and how well they funnel traffic to your pillar pages, which can all have stronger CTAs and push people more toward your sales pages. It’s also good for tracking and testing changes to help you optimize that sales funnel down the line.

You can locate and fill in gaps in topic coverage.

I’ve mentioned this one in passing already, but it’s important enough to reiterate. When you put thought and effort into topic clustering, one of the big things you do is map out the content you have already and figure out how it fits into clusters, if it can. You probably already have some clusters, but you might not have them adequately interlinked or planned out. More importantly, you can see where topics that would be relevant to a pillar are missing, and you can see where a bunch of content that isn’t well-linked is missing a pillar you could create.

Locating and Filling in Gaps in Topic Coverage

This is also great because it gives you a tangible to-do list of content that has immediate value and slots directly into your existing marketing, which can round out a content calendar for months.

You can synergize the value of individual pieces of content to rank pillar pages higher.

Content can’t usually stand on its own. Pretty much all of SEO is about building up the interconnections between your pages, and between other sites and your site, so that value can help boost your content and ranking.

You can synergize the value of individual pieces of content to rank pillar pages higher

Topic clustering is a way of sculpting that SEO value that is not just allowed by the search engines, but encouraged – as long as you don’t resort to shady techniques like selective and unnecessary noindexing and other artificial sculpting.

You build more EEAT metrics.

One of the biggest modern metrics that helps a site grow is EEAT, the combination of demonstrated expertise and experience, accumulated authority, and perceived trustworthiness. There are a million different ways to enhance EEAT, but one of them is as easy as just covering a topic in detail.

You build more EEAT metrics

Think about it; a website that only has one or two pages dedicated to a topic might have good information here, but if the bulk of the site is about something else, it’s not going to be super reliable. People aren’t going to follow it for more information on that topic because they don’t seem to cover it much as it is.

A website that has a lot of deep coverage of a topic is a lot more authoritative and trustworthy as a source of that information, right?

How to Use Topic Clusters Effectively

Making use of topic clusters is a fairly easy but time-intensive process.

The first step is to evaluate your existing content. A detailed content audit is a good way to go about it, but the biggest thing you need is a spreadsheet that has:

  • Every piece of content on your site, with title and URL
  • The primary (and secondary, if relevant) keyword for the content
  • The status of the content. Is it a short-tail pillar page or a long-tail cluster page?
  • The link status of the content. Does it internally link to the pages it should?

You start by analyzing this information and, if you want, drawing a map. There are some tools out there you can use to generate the map for you, including analysis apps like SiteBulb, scraping tools like Screaming Frog or Audisto, or visualizer tools like the one offered by SEO PowerSuite. You can also do it in a design app or even a whiteboard if you want; it doesn’t really matter how you get the map made.

How to Use Topic Clusters Effectively

Once you have this information, you need to start by looking for internal linking opportunities and creating those links. This is super easy to do, which is why it’s first, and it can have some tangible beneficial effects even before you get into content creation.

Next, look for pillar page opportunities. You want to find situations where you have five or more pages with long-tail keywords that don’t really slot nicely into an existing pillar page. You can then figure out which primary keyword a pillar page would center around and make that pillar page.

Since pillar pages are hubs of value, prioritizing them is the natural progression, but they do take a lot of work to implement properly.

Once you have run out of obvious pillar pages to make, you can start looking for gaps in coverage in the sub-topics surrounding your most valuable pillars. Adding a couple of cluster pages to the weaker pillars and bolstering the strongest pillars can both be beneficial.

Finally, you’ll have the occasional orphan page. These, you have to decide what to do with. Some of them won’t be very good, or outside your scope, and have no traffic. I often just delete these myself. Others have a bit of traffic or the seed of a good idea, and you can spin off other topics and build a new cluster around them.

How Can You Generate Topic Clusters?

If you’re starting a new site, or you want to take a seed topic and generate clusters around it, you can do it all manually, but there are also a bunch of modern tools available to help you do it automatically. Some of them leverage the power of generative AI, while others use more traditional relationship maps and keyword listings.

How Can You Generate Topic Clusters

I wrote in greater detail about these in this post, so I’m not going to dive deep into them today. Instead, I just want to mention again how Topicfinder is useful for this kind of research and planning. Topicfinder helps you identify the keywords and topics – especially in clusters – that your competitors are using. It won’t just one-click generate a cluster map for you, but it will give you a great idea of the kinds of topics you can cover and lists of ideas you can feed into other tools to help generate those maps. If you want to give it a try, I even have a free trial available to give it a look.

Written by James Parsons

James is the founder and CEO of Topicfinder, a purpose-built topic research tool for bloggers and content marketers. He also runs a content marketing agency, Content Powered, and writes for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and other large publications. He's been a content marketer for over 15 years and helps companies from startups to Fortune 500's get more organic traffic and create valuable people-first content.

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