Build international authority with multilingual topic clusters

In a topic cluster strategy, you organise your website around core topics that relate to your business or organisation. You develop a parent page, or “pillar” page, around a primary keyword for each core topic. You then develop subpages, called “cluster pages”, for each secondary keyword of the core topic. Lastly, you add internal links between the cluster pages and back to the pillar page.

This helps your rankings in 2 ways:

• It helps Google understand your website: If you structure your site into topic clusters, Google’s AI algorithm can easily tell which topics you want to be known for. This makes your website more relevant for queries about these topics.
• Clustering also lends more authority to critical pages like service or product pages because so many internal links point to these pages and so much secondary content backs them up.

If done properly, topic clustering can help your website rank in crowded markets. It also improves UX experience since it groups topically related information together.

Because they give you multiple advantages:

• Rank for search queries that are already heavily targeted by competitors
• Make the content of your website more coherent
• Make must-rank pages more visible (your service or product pages, for example)
• Improve UX experience by grouping information logically

The idea is to give your content a clear, hierarchical structure. To do so, follow these steps:

• Research your keywords: identify primary and secondary keywords that are relevant to your organisation and that match the search intent of your target readers
• Identify topics: group your keywords into logical topics (e.g., for an insurance company, this could be “car insurance”, “home insurance” and “health insurance”)
• Create a pillar page: write parent pages to broadly cover each topic, building them around a primary keyword
• Create cluster pages: now build subpages around secondary keywords to cover subtopics of the main topics
• Link internally: link the cluster pages together and link all cluster pages back to the topic’s pillar page. This boosts the authority of the pillar page
• Keep improving: update each topic regularly with new content

The goal is to develop an exhaustive matrix of content around each topic that covers every search intent of readers. This sends a strong message to search engines that your content is a complete, reliable source of information about the topic in question.

A keyword is a single word or string of words like “organic bread”. Keywords used to be the focus of SEO, as in the past people would type short queries such as “organic bread Dublin” into search bars. 

But you can imagine how vague a query like “organic bread Dublin” could be. Today, with speech-to-text and predictive typing, people use much longer, complex queries. And search engines have evolved to focus not on matching words in queries to words on websites, but to match the need behind the words, the “intent”, to a corresponding answer or solution on your site.

But doesn’t this mean topic clusters are built around keywords? Yes, keywords still have their place. But instead of trying to match the words people are using, we analyse what the words and phrases relate to. For example, “organic bread recipes”, “organic flour”, “organic bakeries”, “nutritional benefits” and “baking suppliers” all relate to “organic bread”. So do “kneading”, “rise”, “gluten content”, “scoring”, “rating” and “customer reviews”. 

So if your organisation sells baking equipment and ingredients, and you develop content for a topic cluster on “organic bread”, your site has the content to answer a complex question by a potential customer such as: “What is a good place to buy self-raising organic flour with low gluten content?”

Please note: the goal of a topic cluster is not to cover every single possible query relating to a topic. The cluster must be relevant to your organisation and to the intent of your target reader.

There are several SEO tools that you can use to develop and optimise a topic cluster. These include:

• Semrush or Ahrefs: These are great tools for analysing keywords and competitors and identifying content opportunities
• YourTextGuru or 1.fr: These allow you to broaden the semantic reach and relevance of your content
• OnCrawl: This advanced technical SEO analysis tool shows you how Google and search engine bots crawl your website. This helps you identify what to prioritise in your topic clusters
• MindMeister or XMind: These allow you to map the structure of your clusters
• Google Search Console: This is a popular tool that you can use to track the performance of your clusters and tweak your optimisation

But remember that a good topic cluster cannot be built with tools alone. It takes clear planning and strategy. This is why we work alongside our clients throughout topic clustering, from the initial analysis right through to writing, editing and optimising the content.

A topic cluster is an expensive service. The cluster may contain a few dozen pages in a niche market – or a hundred pages in a crowded market. The price of a topic cluster depends on your goals, how crowded the market is, how many pages will be needed to build a cluster that is relevant and authoritative in the target topic, and how much of the content requires generative AI or human expertise.