The 8 Step Topical Cluster Design Process

Last episode I covered how to architect a site for topical authority and the building blocks for building topical clusters , those being pillar pages , cluster pages and internal links , as well as how they relate to each other .

Just to recap , that's pillar pages which cover the core content areas of a site , like home broadband and mobile broadband being pillar pages for a site covering the broad topic of broadband . Cluster pages are supporting pages to pillar pages .

Each cluster page will cover an area of the pillar page topic , such as home broadband for gaming being a cluster page for the home broadband pillar page .

And finally , internal links , which logically and semantically link pillar and cluster pages together , with a pillar page linking to its cluster pages and vice versa , and also cluster pages linking to each other where relevant . All these components joined , working together , make topical clusters which provide the backbone of building topical authority for your site .

So we've got the broad concept in the component parts that make up topical clusters . How do we now start to design those topical clusters for our sites . Well , that's why I developed an 8-part process for manually designing topical clusters . So let's go through the process step so . Step one in the process is to gather keywords and questions all around your topic .

Now , this is one of the most time consuming bits and this is where you've got to find as many sources of questions as you can . You can use your own questions you can't with yourself and it's also great sources of questions out there on the internet , such as people also ask on Google , google auto , complete , reddit and Quora any of the forms you can find .

Looking at competitor websites and really just pulling all those questions together into a bigger keyword list as you can . You might internally have sources that you can mine , such as customer response questions , so things that you get through customer services . Talk to your staff , see the questions that they commonly get from people . Are you an e-commerce site ?

Think about the sort of common questions about the products you sell . You've got to build all these together into a big sort of master keyword list of all the questions that anyone could ask on your topic . So on to step two . This is where we review and understand the questions .

The first part in step one , we're just gathering questions , gathering questions , gathering questions . We're not going to spend a lot of time reviewing them and understanding them until we've got all those questions together . So at this point we're going to look at any questions that we don't understand we haven't got a clear answer to .

We need to understand all these questions so that we can , in later steps , know how we're going to answer them and see how they relate to other questions . So this is really a bit of a stop understand and review all the questions we've got so that we can then move on to the next step , on to step three , which is to identify the key themes and topics .

So we now need to go through the list of questions we've got and want to look for the key themes and the topics that occur over and over , as these are going to form the basis of our topical clusters . So we're really looking for the key areas where we can start to separate and say what are the high level areas of the site .

So , again , if we look at the term broadband , again , if we've got a whole load of questions about broadband , we might see that some questions related to home broadband , some were related more to mobile broadband . Some might be related to different core topics , which say broadband speed . These are all speed rated questions .

So we're starting now to identify these key themes . We're also going to be picking out topics within those . So we might see that there's lots of cost questions , so people are asking questions about costs . We might be picking up the people asking questions about specific providers or comparisons between providers .

So we're just trying to now sort of get these common recurring things that are coming up that we're going to use later on when we go through the further steps . So now on to step four . This is where we create our initial pillars . Now , at this point , you should have identified one or more pillars .

The more questions you've created , the more likely you are to have multiple pillars . So , for example , if we'd collected , say , 300 questions about the topic of broadband , we'll probably see that they are split between home broadband and mobile broadband questions . So you might divide them into two pillar pages .

Based on that split , a smaller set of questions say , if you're in the 4280 range , you might only cover one pillar , so you might choose to keep everything under one core pillar page . Step five is now where we assign questions to pillars .

So we go through all the questions we collected and we now assign them to one of the pillars we identified in step four , so putting the right questions in the right pillars .

We're not going to worry about how we order them at the moment , we're just going to assign them one to one of the other pillars , which , however many pillars we've got , we're just going to assign them in . So on to step six , which is where we identify cluster pages .

So at this step we now review all the questions in each pillar and look for common themes and topics within those questions . It's similar to what you did in step three , but we're now just doing it for an individual pillar , so to work out what each pillar's cluster pages are . So for the broadband example , we might be looking on the home broadband one .

We might be looking for questions on providers , individual providers , so we can identify there's going to be providers cluster pages . We might be looking at spotting different types of users , like gaming users or home working users , so we can see there's questions around ones of those . So we might see that some of them might be common across different pillars .

So we're going to have providers within mobile as well , and it's fine to duplicate cluster types across different ones , where it works like in its examples . Now on to step seven . This is where we assign the questions to individual cluster and pillar pages . So we've now got all our pillar pages and cluster pages worked out .

So our step now is to assign the questions to each of the pages that we've identified . So we first decide the sort of top level questions that are going to stay on the pillar page , because the pillar page needs some high level content of its own .

In many sites a pillar page will tend to ultimately be a page which actually sells something or is trying to get someone to take an action . So , for example , on a home broadband pillar page we'll probably won't have some content around selling actual broadband or to actual users .

So we're still going to want some sort of core content that covers the topic broadly . So you'll see the questions that you've identified for this pillar . There's going to be some that really are top level .

They want to be in that pillar page one and then you want to go through all the other questions and then slot them into the individual cluster pages that make sense to them and then this gives us an actual complete picture of our topical clusters , our pillar pages and our cluster pages and all the questions that we're going to get answered in them .

So this is now our design for our topical cluster that can then go off to actually have the content produced for it . I'm not going to cover here that's like a completely different topic , but at least now we've got the core structure and the core elements of the answers , the questions that are going to be answered across that entire structure .

Now onto the final step , step eight , and that is iterate and update . This process doesn't stay still . As you conduct more keyword and question research . As themes change over time , you want to keep adding new pillars and cluster pages , as well as adding questions to existing pages and new cluster pages to existing pillars .

You've got to keep repeating this process again and again and again . That is how you build and maintain topical authority by being the authority on your subject . By being the authority on your subject means constantly adding in , as new content needs to be produced and new questions arise on your subject , new products come out .

Things change over time , so you've got to keep iterating and updating , and that's worth . This is a circular process . It goes on and on and on , and that covers the process for designing topical clusters .

Now I've got a lot of this going into the book that I'm working on , so if you listen to this podcast at the time of release , this book isn't ready yet , but it will be . So just sign up at keywordspeopleusecom for a free account and when the book's ready , it will come out to you . If you're listening in the future , then just again , do the same thing .

Go to keywordspeopleusecom , sign up for any free account and , as part of the process , you'll be offered the book . Within that there's going to be lots of diagrams that show you how to do this and also explain how you can actually automate this process . This manual process is what we used in the past when we had no tools to help us .

We've since built tools and are working on tools now to actually make this process completely automated with as little human interaction as necessary . So do go there , do look at that . I do strongly recommend that , but I hope you found this useful . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard .

It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See why thousands of people use it every day . Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom .

Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .