Site Architecture For Topical Authority

The most common mistake people make when starting a site is to just start plowing away , churning out content like blog posts , without thinking about site architecture . Imagine if you were writing a book on a topic and just putting the content and chapters in any old order you fancy .

It would be really hard for people to read and understand how everything related to each other and how to understand what you were trying to get across . It would be a mess , and so just randomly posting blog troll type content almost makes it impossible for Google to understand your site and how your content relates to each other .

Now to solve this problem is that we need a architecture for our site that will help us build topical authority to make the site make sense . The content relate to each other . Your users find it easier to navigate around the site and find the content that they're interested in .

That will answer their questions and also helps Google understand the site and how everything relates to each other . It helps reinforce the content on related pages . The core piece that we'll use to do this is a thing called a topical cluster .

If you're not familiar with what a topical cluster is , it is essentially an area of your site that's tightly focused around a particular core topic . These topical clusters will generally be something that's quite broad , that you can break down into multiple constituent parts which you can then cover in detail .

So an example from my old site , broadband at Kotea , uk , of topical clusters would be Home Broadband is one topical cluster and that would cover everything about home broadband . Another topical cluster was Mobile Broadband , which covered everything about mobile broadband .

While they're related to each other in the both types of broadband , they are actually very different in terms of how they work , the kind of deals available , all those kind of things that make sense into putting them into two different topical clusters .

Now a topical cluster itself is made up of three core elements and that is a topical cluster page , topical cluster pages and internal links . So if we look at each in turn , so a topical pillar page is this core topical area of your website .

As we've said , it will be quite broad in what it covers and initially it's probably something that might have felt out of reach for ranking . So , for example , with Home Broadband , yeah , that would be quite a difficult one for people to rank for straight away , but it is a core area of the site . So we're going to have a pillar page on that core topic .

It'll also generally be something that covers such a scope that you'd struggle to cover everything about in one post . So , again , like one post that tried to cover everything possible at Home Broadband would be huge . So you see how this makes sense for it to be a topical pillar . The next constituent part is what's called topical cluster page .

Now a topical cluster page is there to cover a subtopic that is related to a topical pillar . A cluster page would usually cover the entire subtopic on a single page .

So if we follow on from our Home Broadband pillar example , a cluster page for this pillar could include fastest Home Broadband , a cluster page on cheapest Home Broadband , a cluster page on Broadband for Students , a cluster page on Broadband for Homeworking , amongst others . There's loads of cluster pages you could put into this , but that's just for examples .

Now , with these cluster page , sometimes you'll find these cluster pages are actually the topic is too broad to cover in one article . So it's fine then to actually split that cluster page out into its own subtopics so you can treat that cluster page as its own pillar . So therefore we can have pillar pages that have cluster pages .

So the example with Home Broadband on Broadband in UK we actually have a second sub pillar for Broadband providers because there was dozens of Broadband providers so we wanted to then group each of the providers around a provider Broadband , home Broadband provider cluster page . The third component are internal links .

So we use internal links to provide Google with relevant signals between pages , such as anchor text and hierarchical flow . So all pillar pages will link to their cluster pages and all cluster pages will link back to their own pillar pages . Cluster pages can also link to each other where they're relevant to each other .

So in the example we've used so far , we might link the Broadband for Students cluster page to the fastest Home Broadband page if we have a section in the Students Guide talking about the importance of getting fast broadband deals for students .

Now this structure is really useful for just real people when they're on your website to find content , to find related content to each other , and it's also really useful for Google because it helps Google really understand how all your content fits together , how different sections of the site fit together and the relevance between them , based on that internal linking .

Now , in terms of how it works with new sites particularly , is that okay if we started a site about Broadband tomorrow ? We're not going to rank for terms like Broadband and Home Broadband , it's just too competitive .

But the terms and the questions that you start to answer in the cluster pages , further down the hierarchy , they're the ones where , if you do a good job of your content , that's where you can start picking up the long tail keywords which you don't need as much authority in the first place to rank for .

And then other things will start building your traffic and start building your rankings and as people discover your site and your content's good , they'll start linking to your content . Meanwhile , every time you're adding to and improving your content and this helps you raise you up in Google and you will start to rank for more and more terms .

Naturally , and as your cluster pages start to get more authority , that then passes it on up to your pillar pages and they in turn pass up to your home page and eventually this is what brings your site from being nowhere a brand new site to becoming a topical authority in your niche and that's why this structure works so well and what's really key to the

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