Keyword Clusters
Start your keyword clusters to improve your SEO content strategy, making your website users & Google-friendly and your content more relevant.
Over the past few years, it has been noticed that Google is only bringing updates on content. That’s because Google’s engineering team is working to gain an in-depth understanding of how natural language processing (NLP) and on-page content interrelate. And the BERT algorithm helped Google understand those complex prepositions
But despite Google being so smart, webmasters are still optimizing their websites with certain keywords in mind, for which they are not getting good results anymore.
Google’s NLP capabilities are constantly improving, so our on-page SEO strategies need to be further developed. And keyword clustering will help us to do this.
What Are Keyword Clusters?
Keyword Clusters are groups of keywords with several relevant keywords that target the same intent.
For example: “bed sheets” “bed sheets queen” “best bed sheets” “queen bed sheets” These are different keyword phrases, but they represent searchers who want to buy bed sheets.
Now let’s say your company sells bed sheets. So if you try to rank for the first keyword then your market share will be limited.
But if you rank with subtopics and relevant keywords related to your primary keyword, your web page’s keyword count will increase 10-20x and you will get more organic traffic.
Benefits Of Keyword Clustering in Semantic SEO
You have noticed that after searching for a keyword in Google, you get the same results even if you search with similar phrases. This has been for keyword clusters in Semantic SEO.
Keyword Cluster helps your marketing team do more keyword research, create more content, and increase your marketing share.
For example: your core keyword is “bed sheets/SV 60.5K” Now if you optimize only this keyword then you are targeting 60.5K traffic. But if you also optimize the similar phrases of this keyword then you can target unlimited traffic.
Specifically, creating topic and keyword clustering on your website makes it more Google and user-friendly. The advantages of keyword clustering are:
- Get strong rankings for long-tail keywords.
- Improved ranking for short-tail keywords.
- Get Higher organic traffic.
- Rapid ranking improvement in SERPs.
- More features for internal linking.
- E-E-A-T of the website will build very fast.
How to start Keyword Clustering
The most important aspect of Semantic SEO is Keyword Clustering. Although many of us have been doing this before but, clustering is a new term for us.
Step by step learn how to do keyword Clustering:
Step 1: Create a Keyword List
To do keyword clustering first you need to do keyword research. Choose your primary keywords for which you want your website to rank. Then, find all the long-tail phrases, short-tail phrases, and subtopics of the keywords that searchers are using.
To do this you take the help of keyword research tools. See the image:
Moreover, you can use Semrush’s Organic Research tool to see what keywords your competitors are using, and how they are getting traffic.
Now you make a list of all the keywords. like this:
Step 2: Grouped Your Keywords
When you’ve listed keywords, make sure you include the same words, phrases, synonyms, or subtopics that users include in queries. Now you can cluster these keywords and create keyword groups.
The image below is an example of bed sheet keyword research that helps to find out about bed sheet purchase, size, type, quality, and color.
Here are the things you need to know to cluster these keywords:
Semantic Relevance
It is most important that your clustered keywords have the same search intent. So you need to optimize a page with all the keywords that target the same intent.
If you optimize a pillar page with keywords of different intent, it will make the content less readable and confuse Google about what your page content is really about.
For example: your primary keyword is “silk bed sheets (Commercial Intent)” but if you also optimize with the keyword “how to fold bed sheets (Informational Intent)” it will confuse Google.
Search Volume
Your clustered key keywords should have a reasonable search volume. And you have to notice whether it will increase.
Organic Keyword Difficulty
Whether or not you include high keyword difficulty keywords in your webpage will depend on your website’s authority, backlinks profile, trustworthiness, and how established your website is.
Only include keywords in your cluster that will rank organically.
Look At Two Keyword Clusters
When you find a cluster’s core keyword, add it to your complementary keyword.
For example, you should include enough information about long-tail keywords, short-tail keywords, low difficulty, or low search volume keywords on your pillar page that you can easily rank for.
Now apply these keyword clustering fundamentals to our bed sheet product keywords. Here is the beautiful keyword clustering:
Why do these keywords build good clustering?
Because they are focusing on semantic relevance and the same intent. All these searchers are looking to buy bed sheets.
The main keyword “best bed sheets” has the highest value according to keyword difficulty low and we have combined it with low search volume, low difficulty, solid CPC similar keywords.
Now, here’s a second cluster:
Semantically, these keywords focus on slightly different intents. Hence they belong to a separate cluster. These searchers want to buy silk bed sheets.
Our core keyword difficulty is medium so it ranks somewhat competitively. So we filled the cluster with some keywords that will get us more traffic and increase our keyword ranking.
You can do this with keyword grouping tools. They will segment keywords into clusters for you. Or you can do it manually if you are an expert on your niche, and understand keyword metrics and search intent.
Also, remember not to end up adding all the keywords in your list to the cluster. You can use them in blog posts.
Step 3: Create & Optimize Pillar Pages For Keyword Clusters
When you group your cluster keywords, they will show you a road map of how to create, optimize, and organize the content on your website.
Specifically, your keyword clusters represent the main topics of your website. So these keywords have to be included in the “pillar page”.
In our previous example, we identified two primary keyword clusters for our “bed sheets” product.
Now to use our keyword clustering properly, we need to create pillar pages targeting each keyword cluster.
Our keyword clusters should include on-page SEO best practices on pillar pages. We can use content optimization tools or SEO tools for this. Remember, you need to optimize keywords with experience, only then you will get good results. Below are some tips:
- Topical Depth: Focus on writing detailed content that explains the content in-depth and covers the topic.
- Information Structure: Keep the content structure clear, and optimize your keywords in H2 and H3 headings. By doing this I (Sajjad Hossain) got great results and it is one of my favorite techniques.
- Page Experience: Create an attractive user-friendly on-page, use videos, infographics, jump links, etc.
Step 4: Strong Your Keyword Clusters With Blog Content
Now to improve the ranking and topical authority of your pillar pages, you can create blog content that will further strengthen your primary keyword clusters.
These blogs can be long-tail keyword phrases and subtopic keywords targeting queries related to your main keywords.
These keywords play the biggest role in building internal links on your website. As a result, your website’s pillar pages rank faster on Google. So internally link your blog posts to pillar pages to strengthen your ranking chances for high-volume keywords.
Your website will then look like the image below:
Creating a cluster allows you to add internal links to your website. Not only does this keep traffic to your website, it helps Google understand which pages on your website are the most important.
Is Keyword Clustering Worth All of the Work?
Keyword clustering is now a more advanced SEO strategy and can give you the leverage you need to win over your competitors.
The reason for this is that Google’s two big superpowers are natural language processing and unmatched indexing.
Consider: Google understands that millions of keyword phrases in a particular industry are being used by searchers. Google understands even the smallest differences between these keywords and how they are related to each other or not.
You may have noticed over the years that Google has come up with a lot of updates on content. That’s because Google has invested years in their NLP models to calculate content quality signals and determine which web pages will best give searchers the information they’re looking for.
When you optimize your keyword clusters with your pillar pages, you show Google that your website covers the topic and demonstrates the depth of your content.
Additionally, you signal to Google that there are clusters of rich content, which it is designed to identify and promote in search results.
So webmasters need to think more about their content for keyword clustering. It is also the future of SEO.
