How to Group Keywords and Build Topic Clusters at Scale by Jonas Sickler of Terakeet

Jonas Sickler from Terakeet stopped by the Clearscope webinar to give an insightful presentation on "How to Group Keywords and Build Topic Clusters at Scale".

Our biggest takeaways from Jonas' presentation on Topic Clusters & Keyword Grouping were:

  1. Google is investing in topic comprehension with enhancements to their natural language understanding. Topic Clusters are a great way to signal to Google and users that you have subject matter expertise for the topics you're writing about.

  2. Leverage relevant internal and external links from your topic cluster to subtopic pages. Internal links funnel link equity to related pages and external links are useful for backing up claims you're making in your article. Don't cram your topic cluster full of links because that can be considered spammy by Google and users.

  3. Manually inspecting the search engine results page (SERP) to understand the primary intents for a given keyword is the most accurate way to gauge which subtopics are important. You can use tools like Serpstat to group keywords at scale but beware of any tool that focuses too much of their keyword groupings on "common terms".

Here are some additional resources mentioned during the webinar:

Make sure to follow Jonas Sickler & Terakeet on Twitter. 

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Read the transcript

Bernard:

Let's get this show on the road. I'm excited to announce that we have Jonas Sickler from Terakeet. Jonas oversees the SEO strategy for several Terakeet-owned domains, including the company's primary website. He loves the content site of organic search where he can take in to search intent and the customer journey. Terakeet itself is an enterprise search engine technology company that leverages best in class proprietary software, and 20 plus years of expertise to drive business outcomes for global brands. Jonas here is going to talk about how to group keywords and build topic clusters at scale. So, let's get this show on the road. Jonas, to you.

Jonas:

All right. Let's do it. First, I guess, there's the idea of all these different facets of SEO. Some people go deep on the technical side. The reason I've always been gravitating towards the content side of SEO is just really, really passionate about this fusion between SEO and the user journey, understanding the whole package from the end-to-end, what is the customer trying to accomplish at each stage of the journey, and also, this idea of building processes and checklists and organization. All of those things come together in topic clusters.

Jonas:

You get to understand and map out the entire journey, and complete it from the beginning to end. Then there's also the idea of keyword research and organizing and grouping around clusters, and then creating and optimizing the content, building out these checklists. It's why I think I've really gravitated into the topic clusters. Next, I'd like to talk about the idea of, "What is a topic cluster?" I know that there's a lot of people in the audience that have a huge range of expertise. I know [inaudible] is in here. Justin Board might be there.

Jonas:

You guys are pros with topic clusters, and then I know there are some folks that probably have heard of them, have maybe tried them, but didn't quite have the success, and are looking to break past some of those barriers. Then there's probably some people who have never done this before, so just a level set on the definition here, because it's pretty broad. I like to boil it down, just groups of related content that cover a broad theme. I don't like it to be too specific to be just related to blogs, because I think there's ways to expand that beyond that.

Jonas:

The components of it, we've got pillar page, cluster pages, and internal links. The pillar page is really the high-level content overview explaining the broad theme, and then the cluster pages are more in-depth versions of content that are about the subtopics on those pages. The internal links are the connections between those things. I like to actually think of internal links like a metaphor of USB cables, because they can pass both power and data through them. I mean, if you think about backlinks and passing the value of the back link, that's more of the power side. Then you've got the data that passes through in terms of what is the intent, the relatedness, furthering Google's understanding of what the page is about.

Jonas:

Then I want to talk a little bit about the fact that topic clusters aren't brand new. These have been around for a long time now. 2004 was the inception of the concept when WordPress launched their categories feature. Although it wasn't exactly a topic cluster in the sense, it was an actual way to group many different pieces of content together around a theme. Then 2004 came around, and that's when HubSpot... 2016 rather is when HubSpot made the topic cluster strategy really popular. It was the explosion onto the scene. Everybody was really excited about it.

Jonas:

I think a lot of people really tried to make it work, but there was some misinformation, some best practices that weren't done. Then I think it fell flat because a lot of companies that tried it invested in it in the wrong way, and that led to dead ends and a lack of performance. Then leading that into today, why is it coming back? As Bernard and I were talking about earlier on, there's this Google's reinvestment in trying to evolve its algorithm to understand not just keywords, but obviously the themes and the related subtopics and the passages.

Jonas:

I think, at some point, we go from an actual page all the way down to a subheading, a paragraph, a sentence. Google is being able to understand all of that information, and topic clusters, I think, really plays to those strengths, and helps Google understand even better. If I were to take a screenshot of this, I would say this would be your blueprint for how to build a topic cluster. I've got this graphic on our blog post, on Terakeet's blog post, about topic cluster. You can find it there if you don't grab a screenshot here, but this is a really important visual for how to structure a topic cluster is you've got your pillar page.

Jonas:

You'll see that there are color-coded subsections on the pillar page, which each of those links out to the appropriate subtopic. Then the subtopics link with each other, and then back to the pillar page. I could probably even add an extra line that goes out to another subtopic cluster and just a fractal. The thing will keep going. That's an ideal framework of how to build them. On the left side, you'll see that we're not just talking about blogs here. We're talking about ecommerce sites, B2B, SaaS, service sites, so the framework itself is broad enough that you can apply it to all of those different types of websites, not just blog posts, although, I find the most value in the blog because of the way that the content is structured.

Jonas:

So if we were to look at the benefits of why should you use topic clusters in the first place, I think one of the big ones are people. By that, I mean users. First and foremost, that concise content is just easier to consume. I mean, imagine a 10,000-word blog post, and it just goes on and on and on, like we talked about with the ultimate guide strategies. There's just so much content that it's really, really hard to get through it all when a user's trying to find a specific answer. Then subtopics that align better with search intent, if you imagine that massive guide, it probably covers many different subtopics within it, where if a user has a specific question, "Why are they searching in the first place?"

Jonas:

They want to probably learn something. They want to do something. Maybe they want buy something, so aligning your content with those individual subtopics is much better for users. Then related topics in the cluster provide a next step. If you build the cluster out to walk the user through the journey, you've got the awareness stage or consideration phase, and the decision-making stage. If you're building your clusters, the user's consuming the content. Then at the end of that piece of content, if you've answered their question, they're probably going to have another one.

Jonas:

If you have that step built into your topic cluster, and you've got that content and you link to it, then the user's going to stay within your ecosystem, and they're not going to go back to Google and search for another answer. Then the SEO side of that, why are topic cluster is great for SEO while user or clusters provide more context for Google in general? So if you've got a page that talks about a specific subtopic, and there's a lot of different entities entangled with that, if you've written about it in other pieces of content, and then linked out to it, you're giving Google more of that context between the two. Then your depth of coverage shows your expertise.

Jonas:

The more you cover a topic, the more trust users will probably have in you. But also, that Google will understand that you are clearly a subject matter expert in this. So, if you were looking for a financial advice, you're probably going to go to a website. Google's going to favor websites that have a lot of trustworthy financial content. Then internal linking funnels backlink value. We talked about that, where adding all of these links, you may have a topic of cluster with, say, 20 pieces of content within it. Maybe three of those have attracted a lot of backlinks because they're highly valuable, and the rest of them maybe haven't gotten any links.

Jonas:

Well, if you've built your topic cluster, and you've provided those internal links, you'll pass a lot of that value through to the other pages, and the whole cluster will rise. Then finally, let's say that... Brands that really know what they're doing with topic clusters are able to dominate search much more effectively. As an example, Terakeet recently did a deep dive into the beauty industry. We looked at 3,100 keywords that represent 9.4 million searches across nine different sectors in the beauty industry to find out which brands are dominating.

Jonas:

You might have expected brands like Ulta or Sephora, Dove, perhaps L'Oreal, any of these, Neutrogena. They're really big names in the beauty industry. You would probably think, "These are billion-dollar companies." They are probably dominating search across all of them." It turns out that wasn't the case at all. It was the publishers, the online publishers, brands like Allure, Byrdie, New York Magazine, Good Housekeeping. Collectively, those four brands held more than 40% of the market share on average across all of the sectors, maybe excluding one of them, but they were just absolutely dominating.

Jonas:

They were doing so because of topic clusters. Even in products-related searches, those brands, those publishers, they don't sell these products. They're making money because they rank for it, and then they have affiliate links that they're sending their users to, and they're making revenue off of that. Even without selling or creating any products, they were still dominating these categories. We zoom in on Byrdie in particular, because Allure was technically number one, but Byrdie has come out of nowhere, and is absolutely crushing it with search.

Jonas:

According to SEMRUSH, it drives 21.3 million monthly visits using topic clusters. We zoom in a little bit more closely, and we can look at just the piercing's topic cluster on their website. They have more than 66 blog posts about piercings, representing 26,000 keywords, and driving more than 1.4 million monthly visits just from that one topic cluster, because it's so well organized. One more time, we're going to zoom in again, and look at a specific example of that Byrdie topic cluster around piercings. This represents the top four posts within that cluster. There's a lot of information here, so I'm not going to read everything line by line.

Jonas:

But basically, I wanted to look at the... Excuse me, look at these top four, in particular, the industrial bar piercings guide, the septum piercings guide, and each one of those target's a singular head term. As you can see, it's highlighted in the bold at the top of the keyword list, but then also ranks for all of these other keywords. Across each of the four, they all have that same pattern where they rank for the head term, and then they also rank for all these long term. Each of those posts collectively drives hundreds of keywords, and more than 100,000 in traffic for each of these just in the top four groups.

Jonas:

I do want to take a pause. I'm going to do this a second time, because I know there's so much information. I know there's probably a lot of questions that maybe are boiling up. So, Bernard, I don't know if you've got any you want to ask or if anybody else does [crosstalk].

Bernard:

We have a couple trickling in. We'll be answering the Q&A as much as we can in chronological order. I do recommend that if you do have questions, that you send them into the Q&A as quickly as possible. We first have a question from Jordan. He says, "When you said companies invested in topic clusters in the wrong way, what does that mean exactly? Can you give examples of the wrong way to invest in topic clusters?"

Jonas:

That's an awesome question. It's really about misunderstanding the things that are important when building a topic cluster, and focusing on the wrong things. For example, URL structures, that's a huge one that comes up every time somebody's asking, "Oh, I don't want to... I have to break my website, because I have to completely redo whole... All my URL structures, I got to put in folders." No, you don't have to do any of that. We looked at... That's actually one of the things that made the Byrdie case study analysis so challenging is because they have no URL structure.

Jonas:

Every single post on their site is a blog post, and every one of them lives directly off of the root domain, so we had to look for the posts to find the clusters. You don't need to worry about those. The other problem that I think that people tend to invest incorrectly in is the idea of duplicate that keyword targeting in a sense, I guess, where you say, "Well, we're going to... We want to rank for how to make a content strategy," So they target keywords like best way to make a content strategy, five methods to make a content strategy, how to make a content, and so on and so forth.

Jonas:

It's ultimately the same post written over and over and over again. In their mind, they're saying, "Well, if I just write all these posts, and I link back to the one I want to rank, then Google's going to rank that one," But that's not how it works in practice. Google will end up getting confused by all those. I'd say that's the second biggest mistake is just investing in a ton of content that's very disorganized.

Bernard:

Totally agree. Totally agree. They have a handful of the... They're all streaming in now. Lots of good stuff. Definitely, Jonas is going to be walking us through how to create topic cluster, so I'm going to gloss out some of these that are showing up. We do have one from Cindy Richards. She asks, "Do you get extra points from Google for publishing all of the posts in the cluster in one day, or can they be published over time?"

Jonas:

That's interesting. I know that we've talked about whether... I mean, and it's not just Google to it, right? It's your users. If you're publishing all at once, then the users that are interested in that cluster, they're going to have everything in the world because you're giving it all to them, and they have everything mapped out. But on the other hand, anybody that comes to your site is going to just... If you're only published that whole slam of content all at once, it can look a little strange, right? Everything is just chronologically. You only write about this one thing, and then all your other content is about something different.

Jonas:

In terms of Google points, no, it's not about like if you do it all at once, you're going to get better rankings, or Google's going to see you as more of an expert. I think that, sometimes, having that longer term publishing schedule tells Google that you've always got something relevant to the topic that you're continuous saying... Because otherwise, you can imagine, you publish it all at once. It'll get stale unless you go back and refresh it, but then that's a lot of work too.

Jonas:

I think for the best experience, overall, it's good to have enough content out there. So if you're just starting a new cluster, maybe stagger every other week or every other... Just stagger your publishing schedule in a way that you can get a constant stream of post out there, but that doesn't look like that's all you're publishing on.

Bernard:

I agree. Couple more, and then let's get into how to actually do it. I'm sure a lot of these other questions that are popping up will be somewhat answered along the way. The more definitional question that I think is interesting that Mark asks is, "What is the difference between clusters and silos?" I think you also will cover that in a bit, but I'm going to throw in what is the difference between pillar pages, hub pages, topic clusters, silos, all of those? I lumped them all together. Not silos, but I lumped together hub page, parent page, topic cluster in my mind. Any thoughts about that stuff?

Jonas:

I think there's a couple of similar concepts, and this is where it gets really interesting because I tend to... Again, it's a framework, so it's not like you have this hard rule, right? I tend to build clusters with that framework in mind, so we have a pillar page, and that is the highest level overview of a topic. Then there's the subheadings that go into some details, so it doesn't feel thin, but not so much detail that Google's going to rank that instead of your deeper cluster page, but I'll also treat individual cluster pages sometimes like a pillar page. It's almost like there's different levels, where each of my cluster pages will have subheadings, and each of those subheadings might link out to a related subheading or a related topic.

Jonas:

You'll get this continuous, just like a fractal goals, where every time you zoom in on another one, it follows the same framework. That's the pillar and the cluster page concept. But then there's the idea of content hubs, and that gets mixed in and sometimes confused. I think of content hubs as being just this experience that answers a specific set of questions. It can be a topic cluster. I mean, maybe you've made a financial guide that tells you everything you need to know about investing in a 401k or something like that, and it is its own topic cluster, but it's a little bit more concise.

Jonas:

It's more about an experience. Maybe there are chapters. It could be one page. It could be several pages, but I would say that that is a single experience, and it may be within a topic cluster, and a topic cluster may include that, but then also link to other blog posts and such. The idea of the content hub could be if you can include video, include all sorts of things. I would say it's part of a cluster, but it isn't exactly the same thing as a cluster. I know that's confusing. I don't know if I answered that correctly.

Bernard:

I don't know. I don't think there's a completely right or completely wrong answer.

Jonas:

No. Let's think about it as a great user experience as a... The, it in itself is the hub, and then the cluster is how you link it out to other pieces of content.

Bernard:

Yes. Yes. I do have... Personally, I do think there is something that is a super topic cluster. You can imagine best credit cards would be a super topic cluster in my paradigm, because it would link out to a subtopic cluster of best travel credit cards, which could then link out to subcategories of best travel credit cards for students or business, right? I think that it's all sort of Venn diagrams of overlapping stuff.

Jonas:

I think that's an awesome way to put it.

Bernard:

One more question, and then I'll let Jonas continue since this is really relevant. Were those Byrdie traffic numbers annual?

Jonas:

Those were monthly.

Bernard:

Monthly.

Jonas:

Drawn from SEMRUSH. I know everybody has different tools that they prefer. [inaudible] shows us lower traffic numbers, lower keyword volumes. SEMRUSH is bigger. Just for consistency's sake, I pull everything from SEMRUSH so that I'm not mixing data and mixing different signals and numbers and things. The traffic trend is really pronounced. I mean, they came out of nowhere and over the last... It was over the last two years, they grew from seven million to 21 million blog traffic by using this topic cluster of methodology.

Bernard:

Alrighty. Well, we still have a lot of questions. Again-

Jonas:

We'll get in there.

Bernard:

... if you have questions, drop them into the chat. We'll use... I guess, this up voting systems pretty cool. It's the first time I've enabled it. We'll use that to figure out which ones we should definitely prioritize, but drop them into chat as they come up, and Jonas will [inaudible].

Jonas:

Cool. Let's look at... We've talked about some of the mistakes. We did touch a little bit on the idea of why the mistakes happen in the first place, because I think that's an important idea and... Oops, where did I go here? To get a little bit deeper on exactly the most egregious mistakes... In the very beginning, you and I talked about what are some of the things that brands are doing wrong? I call that two things in particular, but there's a few more. The internal linking is a big one. Sometimes, what happens is brands will include two few links.

Jonas:

This falls a little bit into the idea of siloing that we were talking about, just not adding enough links so that if you mention a topic, you should link out to it within reason. I'm not going to put any numbers out there and say, "Well, X number of words or X percentages." I'm not a fan of that algorithms page rank sculpting concept of SEO, where you have to have a certain percentage of it. That's just... I prefer to think about it in terms of user experience. If I mention a topic, I'll link to it. If I feel like I might have too many links on the page, I'll remove the ones that feel less relevant to me.

Jonas:

Just because I mentioned content strategy, I might include a link, but then if I get... If I add a whole bunch of additional links to the page, I might say, "I don't really need that anymore." It's not core to the piece. It's just a tangential relevant mention. Then I would remove that, but make sure you're not being too sparse with your links, or you're not going to be passing the value or those signals. Too many links, obviously, looks spammy. That's the biggest one. A user reading it and seeing one or two links per sentence is going to look really atrocious. It's going to...

Jonas:

They're not going to know what to click on, and it doesn't look right. Then there's also the idea that if you have way too many links on your page, you could dilute some of the outbound page rank value that flows from it. Using the wrong anchor tech, this is I think one of the... one of the bigger internal linking mistakes that I see happening, where it can happen one of two ways. Either you've got two internal links on the same post with the same anchor, say content strategy, content strategy, and they both link to different pages.

Jonas:

That is, in my mind, it just... It's more of a... You're you're telling Google that both of those pages are about that exact thing. Maybe they are both about content strategy in some way, but you should be a little more specific. I think that's the big point is try to use either broad match, or use this specific anchor that the page is about. So if it's about content strategies, great. If it's about how to build them, great. Don't worry about, "Oh my, if I use the keyword, I might get penalized." That's not... It's your website. You're allowed to do what you want.

Jonas:

I would say be descriptive as possible, but make sure your anchor is unique to each page, and also describes the keyword that you're targeting. The wrong placement is the other one where sometimes there's this idea that, "Oh, you have to put all your links at the top of the page because that's the most valuable place." There was some truth to that in the past. Maybe if you strip away every other signal in the universe that Google uses, and you just say, "Is a link worth more if it's higher on the page?" Maybe infinite testimony, yes if that's the only thing you're looking at.

Jonas:

But when you start thinking about relevance, and when you start thinking about context, if you mention that keyword in the first paragraph, but then you have an entire subheading about it with an H1 or an H2, rather, and you're talking about it in three paragraphs, and you mentioned the word 10 times, that's where I would put the link. I wouldn't worry about trying to squeeze in at the top just because it may have some more value. I think there's much more value of putting it in a place that's relevant for users, and tells Google a bit more about where it's going.

Jonas:

We did mention the idea of rudderless content as being another problem that sends brands astray. One of the things that's problematically good is retargeting the same keyword over and over again, like we talked about where you think you're creating unique content, but it's essentially targeting the same keyword with the same intent or slight variations of that keyword where Google will really just be looking to rank one page for all of those.

Jonas:

Then that extends to users where if you think about the user experience around redundant content, imagine if a user comes to your website. They read a post, and they get a lot of value about it. Then you tell them, "Oh, check this other post about this topic." Then they go, and they read it, and it's rehashing the same ideas. If that happens too often, then they're going to start to think, "Well, you're just spinning content. You're not really providing additional value. I'm probably not going to come back and read that."

Jonas:

Then finally creating sparse clusters, which is maybe you start the idea of, "Hey, we're going to create a topic cluster around this theme," and you build out a pillar page, and maybe one additional cluster page, and that's it, and you just lose interest in it or something. Well, now your pillar page doesn't have any supporting content, because in it of itself is really intended to be a high-level overview. It doesn't really get into detail or depth on any of the subtopics. You don't have any subtopic pages that do that as well, so now everything just feels pretty thin. If that happens over and over again, then you really end up running into problems.

Jonas:

To that point about siloed content, a little bit more depth on that. I think there's a couple of different thought processes about what that exactly means. I do subscribe to the idea of siloing in the idea that you are grouping content within silos of categories or relevance like a topic cluster or a category page, but I think that the broader definition of siloing that tends to be used in the SEO community is more about locking it in. I don't subscribe to that, which is essentially you're not allowed to link out of this topic cluster to any other clusters at all, because the thought behind that is to keep everything relevant within the cluster, and make it this echo chamber of relevance.

Jonas:

But I think that the downside of that is there's no such thing as a topic or a subject that exists in a vacuum. There's a core central piece that fades out, and there's Venn diagrams of things that connect to it. I mean, if you think about dogs and cats, those aren't two different things, right? Those are completely different things. They shouldn't be in the same cluster, but they're both pets, so there's an overlap. I think of clusters as just related topics, and there's always room to overlap, and there's always room to link out. That does provide additional context for Google, and passes page ranks.

Jonas:

Think of siloing more as like, "How do I contain the relevance, but then also link out where it's appropriate to other topics." That, again, just really stifles the context for Google to understand beyond the other topics that exists, and it holds back the ability to pass that page rank and backlinks. Then you think about UX too. If a user is reading a blog post about some topic, and they're really interested in it, and you mentioned something in a subheading somewhere, that's part of a different cluster, but you didn't link to it. You didn't mention...

Jonas:

You didn't suggest that you even have content about it, and that user is interested in it. They're going to go back to Google. They're going to look for the answer there, and you may or you may not show up. I think that you're creating unnecessary barriers for users by not linking out and exposing users to other content outside of a single cluster. Those are the biggest mistakes. But I think in order to avoid them, it's important to understand why it is that those mistakes happen, kind of what things to look out for. One of the big ones is SEO misinformation, and it's hard.

Jonas:

This one is really hard, because it doesn't always come from mistrusted sources. It could come from a highly trusted individual in the SEO industry, because they wrote a post seven years ago, and never updated it. Now, that post is old and has outdated information. That's where things get really hard because you don't necessarily know if... Even if the date says 2021, you don't know. Did they just change the title date, and not update any of the content? It's tough. You just really... I think you always have to be on your toes, pay attention to what Google's doing.

Jonas:

What are the goals that Google is prioritizing in order to evaluate whether information that you're reading is trustworthy or out of date? Then in other cases, it just could be lazy, bad information that you read. Unfortunately, if it's ranking well, it might seem trustworthy, but always something to just pay attention to. Then focusing on the wrong details is another one. We talked about URL structure. Remember how you don't necessarily have... You don't have to have folders built into your URL sub folders in order to build a topic cluster.

Jonas:

But if you're focused on that, you might inadvertently damage your SEO by redirecting everything in order to create these subtopics. You're focusing on the wrong direction, and maybe not prioritizing the things that are really important in lieu of that, and so that can derail the process. Finally, the improper grouping of keywords, this could come because just misunderstanding search intent, or choosing an SEO, maybe you see the SERP, and you choose a strategy that doesn't align with what your SEO strategy is. You see what's working for somebody else, but not considering the fact that, well, maybe that's ranking because it has a billion backlinks, or maybe their authority is incredibly high.

Jonas:

Maybe they have one post on their site, and you've got 20 posts on your site, so Google's choosing their content differently. I think it's important when you're grouping those keywords keep in mind your personal SEO strategy, what works for your business goals. We'll touch on that a little bit later as well. I want to take one more pause just in case, because we're going to get into the how to build them, and talk about some differences between manual searching and how to evaluate tools that automate the process for scale as well. So before we get in there, what else anybody have anything?

Bernard:

There is a lot of stuff. We're going to make this one more rapid fire, just because there's still some stuff to fit in. I'm going to select them more from a relevance perspective of exactly what you were just talking about. We have a question from Anita. Have you ever had to restructure a topic cluster because searcher intent has changed?

Jonas:

Ooh, nice one, Anita. Yes. I tend to try to go back and look at content a lot, because that does happen. Sometimes the in... Especially, here's a great example. Looking at the beauty industry study that we did. What we noticed is that there was a big swing, because we looked at the snapshot pre-pandemic and then post pandemic to see how the brands that were winning, how they're still winning. It turned out that a lot of those online publishers began to win post pandemic, because what happened is all the retail locations were shut down.

Jonas:

You couldn't go into those stores and ask the questions to the beauticians, to the sales people in the store that you would normally ask, and so people had to turn to Google to ask those questions. So instead of being a product search, Google was starting to interpret as people were clicking on different types of more informational queries. Google was interpreting that people weren't quite ready to buy yet. They still had questions, and so yes, as search intent changes, you have to go back, not necessarily restructure the cluster, but make sure that the content within the cluster still aligns with search intent individually on a page by page basis.

Jonas:

Maybe you have to go back and add another one. Bernard, you had a great point in your webinar at one point on completing the journey, which was as a subject becomes newer or become... It goes from new to old, and people become familiar with it. Search intent shifts from, "What is this? Oh, what are the benefits of this? Now, why is it important, and then how do I do it? And then..." It's less about the customer journey sometimes, and it's more about just the general public's evolution of knowledge around a particular topic, especially in the health industry, so definitely want to go back and restructure individual pages, and maybe add more to the cluster as needed.

Bernard:

Totally. Totally. One more question, and then I'll let you get back to it. There's four of them that all basically are stabbing at the same concept. It's this idea of internal links, external links on topic clusters. I know you just covered it in your section as common mistakes, too few links, too many links. The general question is what is the Goldilocks amount of links for your topic cluster, and do you consider external links in your topic cluster as okay and relevant, and also, when you are thinking about internal linking between your subtopics and your topic clusters, what kinds of anchor text should you be using to pass the most juice or whatever, that kind of stuff?

Jonas:

I will try to do this one quicker. So, yes, one of the things I definitely pay attention to is which pages in the cluster are inheriting the most backlinks? That's the first, because that's what I consider my seed pages, where I want to maximize the flow of link value out of those pages into the others of the cluster. Sometimes I approach it from, "What's the most relevant pages to link to blah, blah, blah?" But you also really need to know which ones are your money pages. Which ones are getting the most link value to pass on?

Jonas:

Then maybe you'll consider adding a few extra links to that one to other pages. Even if you just mention a word where normally you'd be like, "Well, it's okay to link out a little bit more if you have a lot of value to pass along." There was that component. There was... What was... There was another piece to that other than-

Bernard:

So external link.

Jonas:

Oh, anchor. I don't worry so much about linking out from a guest post out of our site to other sites in terms of bleeding page, rank value or anything like that. I do... I link out when I have value to per... When I want to show my users something value if I'm starting a statistic, always, if I'm claiming something or mentioning a company or a brand or an example of something that I want to call out, I'll always link out in those cases. I don't ever say, "Well, I've linked out too many times. I'm not going to do that anymore, unless I'm linking to something like an SEMRUSH or ASHRUSH FOR..."

Jonas:

I'm not going to link to their homepage and then also their keyword tool, because I'm talking about both of those things, so I'll control it that way. In terms of anchor text, the number one rule I would follow there is have a list of your... You have a blog post. You want it to rank for these 20 keywords. Exclude all the similar variations of how can I, how do I, how should I, but your course out of maybe whatever five, 10 keywords that you really want to rank it for, and try to use those in the anchor text from your posts.

Jonas:

Especially when you can pick up on the intent, if the intent is what is this thing or the importance or the benefits or the examples, use some of those phrases in your anchor text. If it's how to or methods or process or ways, try to use those in your anchor text, so you want to convey both the intent, what is the user going to accomplish here? Then also some of the longer tail variations, because those are the ones that you're going to spike the rankings much more easily than your head terms. It also just shows Google a little bit more variety about what the page is about.

Jonas:

I don't use exact match, not because I'm afraid it'll get penalized, but because it doesn't... You want to spread out the semantic value that you're passing to it. It's about all these things together.

Bernard:

Awesome stuff. There is... I know these were asked really early, and stuff around visualizing topic clusters, avoiding cannibalization issues. We'll totally talk about that. I just figure when Jonas walks through how to actually do it and group keywords that you'll get insights into his thought process there, which is why I've been holding off on asking those. Any case, let's get this presentation going again.

Jonas:

Awesome. You guys have some great questions. This is cool. Now, let's talk a little bit more about the concept of building topic clusters in general. So first and foremost, I think about it as their guidelines are not rules. We've already talked about the fact that you don't need to do all these different things to build a topic cluster. You have this general framework that's almost like a fractal where you can zoom in and out of, and you can use them for individual posts, for pillar pages, for entire categories.

Jonas:

Then the other idea here is when you're building your clusters, think about the customer's journey at all times. It's really easy to get wrapped up in the idea that we're just talking about keywords, and forget about the themes and the intentions that the user has, and so always want to think about, "When I'm building this cluster, did I represent the entire funnel? Did I... Do I have keywords about the discovery stage and the consideration phase and the purchase phase?" Then finally, don't drown in the details. That's an important one.

Jonas:

I want to make sure that when we're thinking about all these different pieces of it, it's easy to focus on the checklist, or did I add enough internal links, or did I add too many links? Those are important. But at the end of the day, it's all about making sure that you have the complete user journey mapped out, and linked together so that... Walk in their shoes. If you're a user, and you come to this page, think about the questions they're going to have as they read your content, and then you have something to offer them as a next step.

Jonas:

The other part about building topic clusters is not to think about it as a single set of rules that applies to everybody. You have to think about your own SEO strategy. Are you going to target the competitive keywords, the high volume keywords, or are you targeting simpler, lower competition keywords? I mean, it requires an investment to do the higher volume keywords. Is your content strategy going to focus entirely on trying to rank as many keywords as you can around a massive guide, which again is a huge investment? It's a lot more content. There's a lot of...

Jonas:

You have to build a lot of backlinks to get something like that to rank against competitors, or you're going to go after more streamlined, have a wider base to your content. Then a part of that as well, are you going to invest in backlinks? Are you going to build homepage links or direct links to either your pillar or category pages or to individual pieces of content, because that's an important piece of the strategy as well? You can't really build a topic cluster without knowing these questions first. You have to answer these before you move on to actually building it.

Jonas:

We talked about organizing our keywords. First of all, I'll show you a visual next that'll make it a little bit clearer, but always use when you're organizing your keywords in a spreadsheet, use hierarchical columns so that you have your keyword, and then you have the head term that all the keywords map to, and then you have your topic cluster that they roll into, and then maybe a category or a subcategory so that everything maps together. You'll also want to have a column for your search volume so that you can use some formulas to calculate all of the total keywords and the total volume per blog post, and then per cluster, and then maybe even per categories, that way you can really help prioritize how you're going to tackle writing them individually.

Jonas:

I actually have a template that it's just a really simple template that I'll be sending around in an Excel sheet. We'll follow up with an email, so you can just use that if you don't have one, and it lays all this out for you already. It already has the formulas built in so that if you start populating it with your keywords and your search volume as you begin to map those two head terms and topic clusters, it'll automatically sum those up, so you'll have an idea of the total volume that you're working with for each one. But this is the visual of how that would look in a spreadsheet.

Jonas:

If you want to screenshot it, that's fine, but like I said, I will be sending an email around to following up. So couple of guidelines at least to think about when mapping keywords, first of all, I manually search in Google. I mean, I know if you've got millions of keywords, that's not going to happen. If you've got 10,000 keywords, that's not going to happen. But I always think about this as we figure out our huge, massive keyword universe first, "Here's everything that we care about." Then from there, when we're going to be writing content, that's when I like the idea of at least manually doing it.

Jonas:

If I have a smaller set of a hundred or a few hundred at first, or as a followup to using a grouping tool, like we'll talk about later, if you do have a few thousand, and you just don't have time, you don't have the resources, you want to manually group them, or you want to use a tool to group them. Then that's a great way to chop through quickly. Then I run a manual check just to make sure it does line up with our SEO strategy. So when you're searching the keywords, then you want to take a look at the search, and see...

Jonas:

I've got an example in the next slide of, "Is there one search option? Does Google return the same essential content for the keywords, or are there different choices that you have to make in order to group the keywords?" When there are different choices, you always want to make sure that you're aligning with the search intent behind them. It doesn't work as well if you group keywords that have mixed search intent. Sometimes that's going to happen. It's rare, but I mean, I'm not going to rule it out that sometimes you'll have something that starts off with what is X, and then how to do X, and they're actually part of the same piece of content. That does happen.

Jonas:

Just pay attention to that so that you're not accidentally grouping too many keywords with mixed intents because Google's looking for that intent. Then as a rule of thumb, I tend to group more keywords together for a single blog post. Then if I'm not ranking for some of those keywords that are maybe almost fit, but I included them anyways. If you find that after a couple months that you're not ranking for some, then break it out and write a new piece of content for it. I think that's a better approach than if you start off by writing 10 different pieces of content that should have been connected together, then nothing's going to rank your cannibalizing, and you're confusing Google.

Jonas:

It's better off to say, "All right, well, here's this content. It ranks really well for a whole lot of stuff, but this particular set aren't ranking, so we need a new piece of content." Also, it saves you a little bit of money than creating content, and then throwing it away. Here's an example from that of keyword grouping from the Byrdie case study that we had looked at previously. This keyword do belly button piercings hurt, if you look at that, you're going to see there's a lot of... This is the top 10. You see a lot of content that's related to the pain side, and then there's also some ultimate guides that are ranking in here as well.

Jonas:

You would have to decide, "Do I want to write the massive ultimate guide, or do I want to target the easier, slightly lower volume, more intent-driven? Does this hurt?" That's going to... In order to answer that question, you need to go back to the what's your SEO strategy? Do you want to invest in the guide? Do you want to invest in link building? Do you want to invest in the other ones? Here's another example. Byrdie, again, has the same guide ranks for this, but there's other content that targets the cost factor, so you have to make that decision.

Jonas:

It's like a tree. Am I going to do the guide, or am I going to do the cost? You can lump them together. Then if you found that, "Hey, we're not ranking very well for these. Let's break it out and do a separate one." This is the example of a side by side. There's some... You could write the one post on one hand, or you could go straight in, and write the ultimate guide to the center that ranks for all of them. Byrdie does that approach very well across all of its... This is like... Do you still want to write the ultimate guide? We've talked about...

Jonas:

We know some of the content that tends to rank for these really well. A lot of those times, those are very powerful domains, and so you have to take that into account. What are the pros and cons of creating the ultimate guide? Guides tend to earn a lot of links easy. Maybe you have to go out and reach out, but people tend to like to link to those. They also rank for a lot of keywords, and they work really well for pillar pages because they tend to skim across the surface of things, and then link out. But what are the cons of creating these types of things? Giant pieces of content tend to be too broad.

Jonas:

Sometimes if you choose a head term that just is like marketing, for example, and you try to make a 50,000 word blog post about marketing, it's just going to be way too broad, tend to be too long if you're not careful. If you go too deep on things that you've also created subtopics for it, then you'll end up cannibalizing your rankings on those. At the tail end of the thing here, so we've talked about the manual grouping. Now, what about automation for scaling? Some of the things to think about if you're choosing a tool, there's a few of them out there.

Jonas:

I really like SERP personally. I've tested a few other ones. I've looked at a few other ones. I haven't seen them all, but one of the most... There's two methodologies for the way these tools work. They either group by matching keywords, and they're like, "Oh, all these keywords contain the same term. Therefore, we're going to group them." I don't think that's the way to go, because that doesn't take into account intent. It doesn't take into account Google. Instead, do they group keywords by ranking URL?

Jonas:

So if you search this URL, or if you search this keyword, and you search this other similar keyword, does Google return the same set of URLs for those? Then they should be grouped together. That's the way that I do it manually. Obviously, there's going to be choices that have to be made. But when it comes to the tools, can you customize settings? That's another important one, because there is no one right way. It's all about your SEO strategy. You want to have the flexibility to say group terms according to these rules, and customize it to how your strategy works.

Jonas:

If you want to group fewer keywords together, and have many more pieces of content, or do you want to group more keywords together that are in a slightly broader bucket, and write fewer pieces of content, that's going to be according to how you're building your SEO strategy. When you are choosing a tool for keyword grouping to automate it, some of the things to think about, the pros on the pro side, they are quick. You don't have to have somebody searching for hours or days. They're cost-effective because you're not paying somebody to do it. They're often... It's much more cost-effective to run the keywords to a tool.

Jonas:

They're usually fairly accurate. But again, you have to remember that they are based on a set of rules, even though they're customizable. Some drawbacks is that if you choose the wrong tool, that doesn't group them. That groups them based on keyword matching, and you run 10,000 keywords through that, your mistakes are going to be amplified, and you're going to really run into problems down the road. They can be imperfect, especially if they're grouping by matching terms. There will be some mistakes, almost always require a manual review. This just goes without saying...

Jonas:

I mean, you probably don't want to just hand the reigns over to somebody else, to a machine to just do everything for you, and then just go and invest in building content, which gets the loss of control. If you're somebody who feels like you can't step away from the process, then those tools might not be for you. But if you're okay with knowing the parameters that these tools operate within, they can be a really powerful way to quickly group keywords, and do it in a way that is in line with Google search.

Jonas:

This is the one that I personally use, and really like the way that it works. You can export data, but search, that does a good job because they follow the rules that I do manually. They just automate it, which is to search the URLs, look for commonalities, and then match them, and you can customize the settings based on, "Do you want to include many more keywords together or fewer keywords in a group?" That brings us to the end tail end here. This is quite a quick run through, and then we can get back to any struggling questions.

Jonas:

Clusters are a framework. They work with many different types of websites. They aren't just for blogs, even though they work, I think, really, really well with blogs. They're good for users because they provide a depth of coverage, and they also offer those next steps to keep users within your ecosystem, rather than sending them back to Google. They're great for SEO, because they provide context, and structure and data through internal links, as well as the value of backlinks moving through your site.

Jonas:

When grouping keywords, choose a system that supports your SEO strategy. That can't be overstated. Don't use somebody else's system, because if you're not investing in the same things, then it's not going to work. It's going to fall flat, and you're not going to get the results, and that's not good. Ultimate guides can rank well, but they can also have drawbacks that we talked about. You get... They can be too broad and not ranked for... They may rank for keywords, but they may be ranking on page 10, and that's not going to do any good, so always go back and look at those types of guides.

Jonas:

If you're not ranking for a certain set of keywords that you thought you should be, then maybe you think about breaking that out into a new post. Then always weigh the pros and cons of choosing tools to automate. Make sure that whatever tool you use follows the process that you should be using, that aligns with Google's intentions and goals and your SEO strategy. That brings us to more questions.

Jonas:

So if anybody dares to follow me on Twitter, during the week, you'll get some good SEO content in the evenings and weekends. I might overshare a bit of Japanese maple stuff and gardening things or nonsense, but I try to keep on point with SEO stuff during the day and during the week. I'll-

Bernard:

Follow Jonas. Absolutely. I get tweets from him at Sunday at 9:00 PM. Guy's always mulling over SEO, and he's really, as you can see here, a pleasant and just very intelligent person as it comes to SEO.

Jonas:

I try to think about the philosophy side of SEO, and ask questions. I like to ask questions and have discussions respectfully. Let's put it that way.

Bernard:

Absolutely.

Jonas:

I don't like their... If everybody agrees about everything, and then there's no ground, so I try to find conversations where there's some disagreement, but respectful disagreement, and people can maybe come to new conclusions. I also want to say if you want to go to the blog, to the Terakeet blog, where I tend to write most of my content, you can just terakeet.com/clearscope. It will take you to our knowledge hub.

Bernard:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I do want to get some of these questions answered. We'll just extend for five minutes, and then cut it at that. Colton Gardner very early on asked what's the best tools to visualize or map out topic clusters. I was saving this one for later, because I knew that Jonas was going to be walking through his framework, and showcasing search that. But now, Colton has followed that up to say, "Besides specifically keyword grouping, are there tools that will crawl in existing blog, and visualize existing topic clusters, suggest internal links, that stuff that you have checked out?"

Jonas:

I don't usually. I know there are tools that will visualize those. I know I'm going to get hit on Twitter with this, because I can't remember the name of the tool, but there's a popular one that does visualize a link graph that I've not personally used.

Bernard:

[crosstalk].

Jonas:

I tend to prefer... That's it. That's the one. Thank you. I tend to visualize mine just in Google sheets. That's where I like to map everything out. I know that it doesn't do the mapping the way that you're... I know you're referencing, but I do like Yoast for internal link suggestions. I think it's only available in their premium subscription, but they do say like, "Hey, you mentioned this theme is similar to that other theme. You should link to it." That's a good one for suggestions.

Bernard:

Awesome. Now, we have three related questions around keyword cannibalization. I think Jordan is actually the most well written, so I'm going to go with this. Is it a viable strategy to write an ultimate guide and the specific pieces too, and then link the guide to the specific keyword pieces? That's basically the topic cluster, or does that create duplicative content? So in that case, is there any concern about cannibalizing keywords in the cluster with your separate standalone pages? How do you avoid cannibalization mistakes?

Jonas:

That's a common one, Jordan. Sometimes you don't know. Sometimes you just don't know what Google's going to favor. If they think that the content in your guide is substantial enough to rank, then it may favor the guide, especially if it's got a ton of backlinks coming into it that can push it up, even though you may have a better subtopic cluster page about it. The way that I would get around that is I would make sure that your pillar page is not thin. You don't want to be washed out on the value you're providing, but you want to cover the topic enough that the user really wants to click on that. They have to learn more.

Jonas:

So if you find that you're getting too... That's the reason that I would write your cluster pages first, and then go back and write the pillar page, because then you already know you've covered the topic in depth, and you don't feel as inclined to need to cover it that deeply in the pillar page, but I do think that Google's gotten to that point where if you've got a better piece of content, and you've linked to it, and you've done it from the right place, that Google is getting much better at understanding that you have this other thing that's better to serve as part of this.

Jonas:

I don't think there's as much deal of worry about cannibalization as long as they're distinct, the subheading is distinct from the cluster page.

Bernard:

Completely agree. I think my philosophy around this has always been that the pages don't necessarily cannibalize each other, but what you need to be wary of in my opinion is search intent cannibalization. There is a problem if you have a piece of content that is what is X. You also have another piece of content that is X definition, and you also have a topic cluster that is predominantly designed to answer what is X or X definition. You have three of those. Then I think you're approaching SEO in a bit of a more classical or traditional lens in a keyword-centric approach.

Bernard:

Basically, I think what Jonas's presentation was doing was saying like, "Okay, you can cluster or group together what is X, X definition, and those, because we see a high amount of similarity between the pieces of content." I think that's what you need to be aware of when thinking about cannibalization is not keyword cannibalization, but search intent cannibalization, and then making sure that your pieces of content align with just different and unique search intents. All right-

Jonas:

That's brilliant, all of that, search and cannibalization-

Bernard:

I thought [crosstalk].

Jonas:

You're doing the next webinar on that.

Bernard:

All right. Couple of quick stuff. When you create topic clusters, is it mandatory to create a silo structure for the URL? For those of you that don't understand what that is, that's like if you had terakeet.com/blog/topic-cluster, and then have all of the subtopics live in what is/what is/how it works/why they're important, but they all belong to the sub directory topic-cluster. What are your thoughts on URL structures?

Jonas:

I think it's important to be consistent, and that's about it. I don't think that the URL has any bearing on whether or not your topic cluster is successful. I mean, I'm sure that there are people who've done studies and say, "Well, I checked this and this," but I mean, I look at examples that are working, and I see sites like Byrdie and others doing the same thing in Terakeet. We don't have any structure to ours as well. I mean, I just think that it works. It's something that you need if you're doing topic clusters for ecommerce, and you're thinking about it in terms of category, product subcategory, then obviously you need that structure to organize the content.

Jonas:

But I think the value of topic clusters really comes from having these different pieces of content that target different intents about the same subject, and linking them together in an intelligent way that moves page rank, and passes those relevant signals. I wouldn't get hung up on the URL structures or some of the other more technical things that tend to be more. They're out there as information. I think that's one of the things that tend to derail or prevent a lot of companies from investing in them, because they think they have to redo everything in order to make them work, and they don't.

Bernard:

Totally, totally. All right, couple more rapid fire. Anonymous attendee asks, "Is there a possible downside to just throwing up a bunch of content around the particular topic, and then pruning it and reorganizing it to meet the intended topic cluster framework afterwards, basically quantity over quality, and then fix the quantity of potential junk that you might have thrown out?"

Jonas:

I would say... I mean, the shortest answer would be yes. There's potential downside. The longer answer would be... I wouldn't... I can't imagine a scenario in which you would want to do that and say like, "I'm just going to throw this all up there now, and then fix it later." Rather, I can imagine a scenario in which you have a customer that has that situation, and now you have to go in and prune it rather than start from scratch. Then I would say if it exists, look at each piece of content, and try to prune it so that it does match the search intent.

Jonas:

Maybe rewrite it if need be in an ideal world instead of just optimizing it because you do want it to be as good as possible, but I would definitely not just put it up, and then fix it later. I would start with the best content you can possibly create, even if it's fewer pieces, and maybe pick and choose so that you're not picking two things that are really close to each other, but go make sure you have something from each phase of the journey, and then that answers each of these questions. Then you can go back and fill in the holes later on that you might have left.

Bernard:

Totally. One last question also comes from an anonymous attendee. I've been talking about this thing called Ranch Style SEO, which is counter to Brian Dean's skyscraper technique. But essentially, it's to say that topic clustering as a strategy, we've started to see lose a little bit of relevance, because people have more distinct intents surrounding the topics that they're searching for. So the question in mind then is, I guess, at a high level, what sorts of queries would you not recommend building a topic cluster for, and why?

Jonas:

I guess that one's a puzzler, because I guess it... I'm wondering by what type of queries I'm... I mean, my brain goes to a specific theme, like dog grooming or something like that. I don't know if that's what the attendee is asking if it's a... Is there an industry to where you shouldn't do it, or if there's a market you shouldn't do it, or if a specific keyword? I guess, I don't know enough about the question to be able to answer that.

Bernard:

I guess it's more at maybe at what stage should you consider building the topic cluster? You've identified the keyword groupings, and you know that within dog grooming, you could talk about how to groom your dog, why you should groom your dog, basically at what step should you go, "Okay, I've created enough of these subtopics, and I'm going to put this into now a topic cluster?"

Jonas:

I think that's interesting. I build them as... I mean, anybody who's creating content probably starts with a piece of content in the theme, and they're going to be like, "All right, this is a new prong. We're going to start writing about this now." I think what happens is you decide to invest in a topic cluster strategy, and you have it all mapped out. You know what you're going to do, so phase one would probably be like, "Let's figure out what the keyword universe is around this particular topic, and start with that, and then start mapping things out, and see how many pieces of content we need to write for this."

Jonas:

Then you just start writing them. Maybe you prioritize based on, "This group of keywords has the most volume collectively, so that's the blog post we're going to start with," excluding maybe the highest level head term or something that might be your pillar page, so maybe you put that aside. But creating each piece one at a time, and then as you're building it, you're building the cluster, and then you finally publish that. I think the cluster exists once you start to have the second one and the third one.

Jonas:

You're just... It's not a moment where you say, "We have five posts now. Let's build a cluster." You just start from the first one, but your cluster begins in a Google sheet or something where you say, "We're committed to this. Here's the full breadth of content we can publish, so let's do it."

Bernard:

Oh yeah, man. Well, that's a wrap. Thank you everybody for joining. Again, this was quite the wonderful presentation from Jonas. Thank you for putting that together, sharing your wisdom around topic clustering. Make sure, of course, to follow Jonas. If you want to just chat the chat, mull over deep SEO things, he's really truly a pleasure to chat with. Thanks again for everybody who tuned in. We'll send a recap email tomorrow with the recording, and just some additional resources to check out in terms of Terakeet, their blog, their thoughts, all that good stuff. All right. Thanks so much.

Jonas:

Thank you. There were some great questions. I appreciate it. Thank you, Bernard, for being a gracious host, and hanging out with me for a little bit here.

Bernard:

Oh, always, always. We'll have to have you back at some point just to chat some more.

Jonas:

Definitely. Thanks.

Bernard:

All right. Later, y'all.