Three myths about content clusters

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few things about content clusters that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“It only matters for big sites”

Grouping related pages around a pillar topic builds authority. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

“Our platform handles it”

One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The short version

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about content clusters before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Grouping related pages around a pillar topic builds authority — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.