Content clusters: what to get right first

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you only fix one thing about content clusters this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Start here

Grouping related pages around a pillar topic builds authority. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Then this

Interlink the cluster so the theme is obvious. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Eventually

One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The short version

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about content clusters before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Interlink the cluster so the theme is obvious — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.