Content clusters for small teams

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Most advice about content clusters assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What to keep

Grouping related pages around a pillar topic builds authority. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

The practical version

One thorough page beats five thin ones on the same idea. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

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
• 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.