A short guide to content clusters

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Everything we would tell a client about content clusters in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Why this earns attention

Grouping related pages around a pillar topic builds authority. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to approach it

Interlink the cluster so the theme is obvious. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Where it usually goes wrong

One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What this looks like day to day

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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.