How to get content clusters right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to content clusters is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
What it costs to ignore
Grouping related pages around a pillar topic builds authority. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Interlink the cluster so the theme is obvious
- One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Turning this into a decision
In practice
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about content clusters before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea — 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.