How to Improve Your SEO Content Strategy Using Keyword Clusters

Using keyword clusters can help you enhance your SEO content strategies, making your website more Google-friendly and your content increasingly relevant.

Google’s team of engineers has shifted its attention in recent years to processing natural language and a greater understanding of how on-page information communicates.

Thanks to neural matching, Google was able to comprehend synonyms. BERT assisted Google in comprehending those perplexing prepositions.

Google becomes more intellectual with each major version.

Despite Google’s advancements, most website owners continue to improve their sites with just a few keyword objectives in sight.

This is an obsolete technique, especially given that our webpages frequently rank for several keywords.

For those of us who have really been studying Google since its inception, this seems like such a new frontier for on-page SEO.

Our on-page SEO strategy must adapt to reflect the advances in search as Google’s NLP abilities keep on improving.

So, how do we improve our on-page adjustments to keep up with Google’s advanced technologies?

The solution is keyword clustering.

What Exactly Are Keyword Clusters?

Keyword clusters are collections of keywords that signify searchers who have comparable purchasing intentions.

“Pillow case,” “silk pillow case,” and “white silk pillow case,” for example, are all distinct keyword phrases, yet they all reflect searchers looking to buy pillow cases.

Assume your company sells pillowcases. If you simply strive to rank for the very first keyword, you minimize your market position.

However, if your website ranks for your primary keyword as well as long-tail versions and relevant sub-topics, your website will frequently rate for 10-20x the number of keywords and receive substantially more attention.

How to Make Effective Keyword and Topic Clusters

To fully leverage the potential of keyword clusters, keep in mind that this strategy involves significantly more effort and resources than just a one-and-done methodology to website optimization.

It necessitates more keyword analysis, content strategy, and effort from your marketing and SEO teams.

However, creating topic clusters on your site will ultimately make it much more Google-friendly and user-friendly. Keyword clustering has the following advantages:

• Long-tail keyword ranks are strong.
• Short-tail keyword rankings have increased.
• Increased organic traffic.
• Improved SERP ranking more quickly.
• More chances for internal connecting.
• Developing knowledge and content credibility in your industry niche.

Here’s a quick rundown of how to accomplish keyword clustering and how to create a content strategy based on those clusters.

Step 1: Create a Keyword List

Keyword research is the first step in keyword clustering. There’s a lot of it.

Consider the principal term for which you want your website to be ranked.

Then, determine all of the keyword versions, long-tail phrases, and sub – topics that searchers are utilizing.

To begin with, check your competitors’ rankings to discover what keywords they are currently ranking for.

Then, using a keyword tool, look for relevant keywords, autocompletes, sub – topics, or queries that people utilize to find items and services similar to yours.

There are other methods for documenting your keyword research, but sheets are the most straightforward.

Include organic complexity, search volume, and cost-per-click numbers for each keyword in your shortlist.

These indicators will assist you in determining which keywords have the highest economic value and should be considered “core” terms in your clusters.

During their study, some SEO experts discovered thousands of keywords. If you’re just starting up with this method, a hundred keyword phrases should be enough to discover multiple different topic clusters that you may develop on your site again.

Keep significance and search intent in consideration as you create your keyword list.

You simply want to add keywords which will drive the proper kind of searchers to your website, people who are genuinely interested in the items or services you offer and are most likely to convert.

Step 2: Divide Your Keywords Into Groups

You’ll start to see trends in keywords after you have a vast keyword list.

You will find that visitors frequently utilize the same terms, phrases, synonyms, or subtopics in their search searches. These patterns demonstrate the various ways in which keywords can be clustered and formed into groupings.

The graphic below depicts keyword research for a decking contractor offering decking services.

Here are the guidelines you should apply to categorize these keywords.

Relevance in Semantics

The keywords in your cluster must have comparable search intent if you want them to work effectively together.

If you attempt to optimize a webpage for keywords that are too different, the material will become less legible and Google will become confused about what your page content is truly about.

Search Volume And CPC

Your clusters’ primary keywords ought to receive a respectable number of searches (otherwise, you optimize for nothing).

They should also possess conversion capability (CPCs speak to their economic value).

Organic Keyword Difficulty

Depending on your website’s authority, backlink profile, and level of popularity, you may or may not want to add terms with higher organic difficulty.

Include those keywords in your clusters for which your site has a genuine chance of ranking.

A Closer Examination of Two Keyword Clusters

Pair the cluster’s core keyword with its supplementary keywords once you’ve identified it.

For instance, by adding enough details about them on the landing page, you can add some that are long-tail, lesser difficulty, or lower search volume, or those that would be an easy win.

Let’s apply the foundations of keyword clustering to the keywords of the decking contractor. Here’s an example of a possible keyword cluster:

Why do these terms constitute an excellent cluster?

Because they are semantically related. These people are all looking for a service that can help with their decking needs

The most valuable keyword is “blacony decking,” and we’ve combined it with complementing phrases with lower search volume and high CPC.

Now, here’s a second cluster:

These words belong in their own cluster because they have a semantic meaning that suggests a subtly different search intent. These users are more interested in a specific type of decking, which is timber decking.

You can manually classify your keywords into groups if you are sure of your niche and understand the keyword metrics and the intricacies of search intent.

There are other keyword clustering tools available to help in the process. They can group your keywords together for you.

Remember that not all terms on your list have to be in your clusters as you segregate.

The most valuable keywords should be included first.

A keyword’s value is determined by its high CPCs, high search volume, and relevant search intent.

Step 3: Develop and Optimize Pillar Pages for Keyword Clusters

Once you’ve organized your keywords into clusters, you’ll have a road map for creating, optimizing, and organizing the content on your website.

In essence, the important topics of your website are represented by your keyword clusters.

These are also known as “pillar pages.”

We found two significant keyword clusters in the previous example.

To successfully carry out our keyword clustering, we must construct landing pages for each of those keyword clusters.

For your keyword clusters, the pillar pages should adhere to on-page SEO best practices. Using a content optimization tool to help you improve your material more effectively is one of my favorite tactics.

Prioritize the following areas to boost the ranking potential of your pillar pages:

Topical Depth: Write long-form content that delves deeply into the issue.

Information Architecture: Use a consistent structure and add keyword words in your h2s and h3s.

Page Experience: Include interactive on-page components like as videos, jump links, and carousels to enhance the user’s web experience.

Step 4: Use Blog Content to Reinforce Your Keyword Clusters

You can build up blog content that reinforces your major keyword clusters to increase the ranking and content authority of your pillar pages.

These blogs can focus on long-tail keyword phrases, subtopics, or issues connected to your primary keywords.

As you create additional material, those web pages will group together to form “subject clusters” on your website.

The internal linking profile of this material will have a significant impact on how your website’s landing pages rank in Google.

To increase your chances of ranking for certain terms,, your blog posts should link back to their respective pillar pages.

If your company has many products or areas of specialty, you will be able to create more clusters on your website.

Additionally, expanding your clusters increases the possibility of adding internal links to your website.

Internal connections not only enhance the amount of time consumers spend on your website, but they assist Google in determining which pages of your website are the most significant.

Is Keyword Clustering Worth the Effort?

A more sophisticated SEO tactic that can offer you the advantage you need to succeed in cutthroat industries is the use of keyword clusters.

This is due to the fact that they take advantage of Google’s two main advantages: unequaled indexing and natural language processing.

Consider this. Google analyzes the millions of keyword words used by searchers across sectors. It also recognizes little changes in those inquiries and how they link or do not relate to one another.

In order to compute content quality signals and forecast which web sites would best provide the searcher with the information they’re seeking for, Google has spent years training its NLP models.

By using keyword clustering with your landing pages, you may convince Google that your website is a leader in your field and has a wide range of quality material.

Additionally, you provide Google with the rich content clusters that it has been trained to recognize and highlight in search results.

Site owners must consider their content more broadly as a result of keyword clustering. It also represents the future of SEO.

It’s time for your on-page approach to catch up to Google if you want your web pages to rank over the long run