HubSpot Topic Clusters A Massive Overview & Tips

A long, long time ago, in an inbound galaxy far, far away, executing a traffic driven SEO content strategy was a lot more straightforward. You could come up with a big list of keywords, maybe even hundreds of them, and get to writing in whatever order made the most sense to you. If they link to each other, that's great, but it wasn't really mandatory. Now today, a lot has changed in terms of how you build an SEO content strategy. Instead of just managing keywords and blog articles, now all of a sudden it's a lot more, well, technical. You need to know about the algorithms of Google and other search engines, as well as what they look for now when determining how to rank your content in the search results. And this is where topic clusters come in, folks. That's right. By the end of this video, you'll understand what you need to know about how search has changed, what a topic cluster is, what a topic cluster looks like, and some of my favorite tips on how to build one of your very own. Strap yourselves in, everybody. Let's get started. Our learn on whatever you call it, content marketing, inbound marketing, it doesn't matter. Creating content to drive traffic, leads and sales for your business is much more mainstream than it was 10 years ago. Now, with everyone and their grannies creating content online, Google and other search engines have had to become more sophisticated in how they rank content in search results. You see, like you, Google, bing, and even DuckDuckGo also have customers. Anyone who ever fires up their search engine to find out the answer to a question online, and that also includes you and me, their product is the search results they deliver. So they're always working to improve the quality of the results we see when we search for something online. Looking at Google specifically, it's made massive changes over the years in how it evaluates website content for relevance and quality to deliver better results to searchers. Even more importantly, Google has integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning into their algorithms. And those new supercharged little web crawling robots are not only interested in the content you publish, they're now also wanting you to make it clear to them what your website is all about. Now, if you're sitting there scratching your head going, wait, what the heck does that mean? I'll put it this way. If you're still writing a bunch, meaning hundreds of disorganized blog articles where it's hard to tell how everything is connected or what big category you're trying to own as your areas of expertise, Google will not send you the website traffic that you want and maybe even need. All it knows is that you're creating a bunch of content about a bunch of different stuff, but it doesn't understand how it all connects together and neither does your searcher. Thankfully, topic clusters are here to save the day. A topic cluster in a content strategy is a network of connected content pieces, blogs, podcast, videos, you name it, that all relate to the same central topic. That central topic is your way of showing Google, hey, we own this topic. This is what we're all about. Google, you see us? Let's take a look at a really great example. For example, let's say someone like me is your ideal customer. You might want to own the topic Hoodies for Men and create a topic cluster around that topic that looks like, well, this. So here we are in HubSpot and we are working on my favorite pillar page and content cluster strategy around. That's right, Hoodies for men. Come on, ladies and gentlemen, hoodies are the new rave. But what we are seeing here is this center location is going to be our pillar page. This might be Hoodies for Men, the ultimate guide or definitive resource or whatever we want it to be, but this is going to be the piece of content that we want to own when it comes to the Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck, Duck, go, whatever search engines right here. This will be our pillar page. And then we know the hot topics to talk about around that. For instance, we have the seven best hoodies for summer, plus cool tips. That's right. You can wear hoodies in the summer. It just makes sense. Think about it. You got the hood for the shade, but why? Men's hoodies are the new wedding tuxedo. That's right. If I could get married in my black and white hoodie, you know that I would. Would you? Or Hoodies versus sweater vests. It's not even a competition guide for male hoodie lovers. That's right. I love my hoodies. All colors, all sizes. Well, maybe only the sizes that fit. And how much do quality hoodies cost? Because you can't buy a not quality hoodie. That would just be, well, a sin. Hoodies versus sports coats, which is better at work? Again, no competition. How to choose the right hoodie for your style. I mean, if you're wearing a hoodie, you just got style G gonna throw that out. And then four strategies to prevent your girlfriend from stealing your hoodies. This is the hardest one, probably the longest subtopic article that we will have to write. But this is a content cluster of blog articles, potential landing pages, whatever other content, videos, podcast episodes that are gonna link to the pillar page. And of course the pillar page is gonna link to these P pieces of content. The key here is to make sure every piece of content you create all links to each other, meaning your pillar page, which we'll talk about in another video. You see that pillar page has to link out to every piece of your content cluster, and then all of your subtopics link back to the pillar itself. How many subtopics should your topic cluster have? As many as you need, but HubSpot does say you want to stay between 8 and 22 subtopics per cluster to keep things nicely organized and streamlined. When you implement the topic cluster model correctly, three things are going to happen. You're going to have a site that's way more organized. You're going to increase your site visibility and rankings, and you're going to make it easier to build your content strategies because you'll be more focused on creating the content you actually need. Of course, the key here is you have to choose the right topic cluster because, just like the scientists who brought back the dinosaurs in Jurassic park, just because you can make a topic cluster about anything doesn't mean you well should. My advice choose topic cluster topics that relate directly to the products and services you offer, and prioritize those that serve the areas of your business that need it most. For example, if you offer website design services to businesses and you're struggling to drive revenue for that service, you may want to focus on a keyword around website redesign. You'll also want to validate that those topics make sense from a search volume perspective with tools like Semrush and Answer the Public. You don't want to go too specific with topic cluster keywords, though. The key to picking a great keyword for your topic cluster subject is to keep it big and broad, with a meaty amount of website traffic to back it up. This is different from how you'd go about selecting a keyword for a blog topic. For example, website redesign is an ideal topic cluster Central keyword, whereas HubSpot versus WordPress is much more specific with lower search volume, making it ideal subtopic keyword that relates to the topic of website redesign. SEO content strategies are exceptionally powerful when you use the topic cluster approach. That said, things can get a little bit complicated. And if you need more help, I invite you to check out my completely ungated and totally free SEO content strategy guide linked below. Or if you have any specific questions about your SEO content strategy, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at georgebthomas com. My passion is helping humans like you become the hub heroes your companies need. So know I'm always here for you.