What to ask your agency about content clusters

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on content clusters, these questions are worth asking early.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Grouping related pages around a pillar topic builds authority. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

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