How to Crush Your Competition With Keyword Clusters
You’re dead set on appearing at the top of search engine rankings. The problem? Your competition is too. They’ve likely got an SEO content strategy (or, if they don’t, they’re working on one) and— let’s face it— they aren’t going to let you grab the gold without a fight.
This is the current condition of SEO. There’s more rivalry than ever before and if you want to come out on top, you’ve got to have an unbeatable content strategy.
I can’t stress this enough… every piece of content counts. If it’s going on the web (and it’s related to your business in any way), it needs to be expertly optimized. And beyond that, you need to use advanced techniques if you want to appease Google and convince them to rank your content above the countless other options being uploaded to the world wide web every single day.
Keyword clusters are one of my most highly recommended tactics. I’ve found it to be incredibly effective both for my own business and for the clients I serve.
Today I’ll be explaining exactly what keyword clusters are and how they appeal to Google’s ever-progressing algorithms, resulting in higher search engine rankings for your business.
Let’s get to it.
What are Keyword Clusters?
Keyword clusters, or related keywords, are terms or phrases that are associated with a common theme or topic. When keyword clusters are used throughout a specific piece of content (or across your website), search engines are able to identify the semantic relationships between multiple pages or pieces of content and thus rank you higher for the overarching theme of your copy.
What are the Benefits of Keyword Clustering?
1. Ranking for More Than One Keyword
If you’ve spent any time crafting copy for an SEO content strategy, you’ve likely noticed how hard it is to secure high rankings for multiple keywords with a single piece of content.
Let’s take a blog, for instance. You’ll likely rank for your primary keyword if you’ve done your research and chosen a keyword that isn’t overly saturated. But it’s unlikely you’ll appear as high in the rankings for your secondary keywords or latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords.
Keyword clustering makes it easier to achieve this. Instead of attempting to cram keywords into a single piece of content, you create multiple pieces, each of which are optimized for related keywords.
Let’s say you want to rank well for “pizza recipes”. Instead of writing and optimizing one blog about pizza recipes, you might write multiple optimized blogs on related topics, including:
Vegan pizza recipes
Keto pizza recipes
Authentic italian pizza recipes
As you can see, all of these topics tie back to “pizza recipes”, meaning your website will rank higher for your original keyword or topic.
2. Appearing in Results for Semantically-Related Searches
This is another compelling benefit associated with keyword grouping (clusters). Typically, your content will appear in Google search results if a user types in your exact primary keyword or the title of your page. If you’ve really optimized your copy well, your content may appear for secondary keywords, but this is less likely.
With keyword clusters, you increase the likelihood that your content will appear in Google search results for search terms that are similar—but not identical— to the ones you’ve used to optimize your content.
Let’s say you have written 3 blogs and you’ve optimized them for the following terms:
Art Tours in France
Art and History Tours in France
France Tour Packages
Guided Tours in France
Art Museum Tours in France
All of these keywords are related, and since you have created multiple pieces of content using this keyword cluster, you’ll have a way greater chance of appearing in the results if a user searches for “tour art museums in france” or another similar (but not identical) keyword.
3. Increasing Website Authority with Interlinking
Of all the benefits of keyword clustering, this has to be my favorite. When you use this technique as part of your SEO content strategy you don’t just boost the authority of one piece of content— you boost your entire site!
This is due to interlinking, which Google’s algorithm notices when it crawls your site. Essentially, if one of your pages ranks at the top of Google for a specific keyword and that page is linked to another page on your website, the linked page will also rank higher. So, your keyword clusters actually benefit the entire structure of your site (as long as these pages are linked and the content on each page is related in terms of topic or theme).
Pretty awesome, huh?
How to Find Keyword Clusters
There are a number of tools you can use to identify related keywords that will benefit your greater SEO content strategy.
If you’re looking for a free keyword research tool, I recommend keysearch.co, but be advised that free keyword research tools have their limitations.
For more detailed, in-depth keyword analysis, you’ll want to invest in a paid platform like SEMRush or Moz.
Regardless which tool you use, you’ll want to follow these steps to identify your keyword clusters:
Enter your primary keyword or topic and press search
Choose similar keywords from the list that are high volume but low competition
Use your Google Analytics account to find additional keywords
Compile your new keywords in a list
Plan a piece of content (blog, web page, etc) for each keyword
How to Maximize Your Keyword Clustering Results
You’ll want to remember that each piece of content you create for a keyword cluster term will need to be fully optimized on its own.
For example:
If your topic is: Best Beaches in Italy
And your keyword cluster terms are: Top Italian Beaches, Amalfi Coast Beaches, Best Beaches in Sicily
And you decide to write a blog about: Amalfi Coast Beaches
You’ll still need to find latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords for your Amalfi Coast Beaches blog to rank well and support your keyword cluster (which, in turn, helps you rank well for your chosen topic).
You want to think of this entire process like a pyramid, as displayed below.
The more you optimize each component of your pyramid using the appropriate SEO techniques, the better the entire pyramid will rank and the more traffic you’ll receive.
Are You Ready to Work With an Experienced Edmonton SEO Copywriter?
I’d love to learn more about your content marketing needs. Reach out today!
