Topic Cluster

Articles used to be written one per search term. Target a phrase, publish a piece for it, and whoever searches that phrase arrives at that piece. The arithmetic is simple and it holds for a while.

Two things went wrong as the articles piled up. The first is that pieces targeting similar phrases pushed each other down. Write "how to write meeting notes" and "meeting notes best practices" separately and a search engine can't decide which to show, so both settle somewhere mediocre. The second is that forty articles end up with no relationship to one another. A reader who lands on one can't find the next thing to read, and a search engine gets no basis for concluding this site knows the subject rather than having written about it once.

Split a subject into one central article and several detailed ones, then link them into a single block.

1. Pick a subject, not a search term. Under "meeting notes" sit a dozen or more phrases that people actually type into a search box.
2. Write the central article. A pillar page, covering the subject broadly, sits here. It shows what exists rather than digging deep into any part, and it carries the links out to the pieces that do.
3. Divide the detail. One article per target phrase, with phrases that lead people to expect the same kind of result combined into one piece. That expectation is search intent.
4. Link in both directions. Every detailed article points at the central one, and the central one points at all of them. Internal links, the links between pages of one site, are what physically build this structure.
5. Edit two places when a new article appears. Add a line to the central article's list, and link from a few related detail pieces. Skip that update and the links run one way, which leaves half a structure and no benefit.

Five to fifteen detailed articles is a workable size for one block. Fewer and it doesn't read as a block; past thirty and the central article becomes nothing but a list.

"This isn't a new cluster. It belongs in the meeting notes one."

It's a detail piece for a subject the site already covers.

"The central article doesn't link to this one."

Only one direction is connected, so the structure isn't actually finished yet.

"These two target effectively the same phrase. Let's merge them."

Clearing up two pieces that have been suppressing each other in results.

Ravi regrouped Pagedeck's forty-six blog articles into four blocks. Writing four new central articles and fixing the links across all the existing pieces took three weeks of one person's time. Six months later search traffic was 1.7 times what it had been, and the share of readers who left after reading a single article had fallen noticeably as well.