Inbound Content

Chapter 11Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages

Why Are Topic Clusters Important?

Content marketers are constantly battling for the attention of their audience. But with all the content being published online, search engines like Google are being forced to better organize and showcase the content they think would be helpful to the searcher. This led Google to release a zoo of updates over the years.

The first notable update, which really shook things up, was Google's “Hummingbird” algorithm update in 2013.¹ This update focused on parsing out phrases rather than focusing on specific search queries. Many search engine optimizers and content marketers viewed this as an initial shift from a keyword to topic focus in regards to content creation and website organization.

The next major update happened in 2015—Google's RankBrain algorithm update.² RankBrain is Google's machine-learning artificial intelligence system that interprets people's searches to find pages that might not have the exact words they searched for. Google is able to do this by associating past search history with similar themes and pulling together keywords and phrases to provide a better context-driven search engine results page.

All this change brings opportunity for content marketers to be found and, more important, be found by their ideal audience. That's a key facet to creating successful content in today's online environment. Most forget it's not just about creating content for the search engine. Search ...