One way to define content marketing is by its formats, such as:
- Blogs
- Ebooks
- Videos
- Webinars
- White papers
- Case studies
- Infographics
But there are many other forms that content marketing takes. And just because content is published in one of these ways, that doesn’t make it marketing.
Another widely cited definition of content marketing (published both by HubSpot and the Content Marketing Institute) is: “a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Companies often choose to embark on content marketing because it’s more cost‑effective than outbound marketing tactics such as paid advertising and direct mail: content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising, according to the Content Marketing Institute. But there’s another reason to engage in content marketing and to do it well: You’re actually improving the quality and breadth of content people can find online about the problems that your products and services solve, and that helps everyone.
Once you’ve articulated your content mission statement, it’s time to step outside your company and look at the work you do from a totally different perspective: the perspective of people who know nothing about you. But they do have some connection to the issues you’re working on, and chances are they’re researching those issues, in some way, using digital media.
Content marketing exists solely because of the technology that makes it possible. It’s the technology that people are using to find information in order to meet their own needs, challenges, and desires. It’s Google (and Facebook, and YouTube, and every other search‑driven platform). That’s why, in order to be an effective content marketer for your company, you need to have a basic understanding of how search has changed.
Google rolls out 500 to 600 minor algorithm changes each year, according to Moz. In addition, it occasionally rolls out a major algorithmic update that affects search results in significant ways. Recent ones include:
- Panda
- Penguin
- Hummingbird
- Mobile Friendly
- RankBrain
Search algorithm updates over the past few years have brought us to an interesting point as content marketers:
Search algorithms were responsible for a massive increase in business blogging in the 2000s and early 2010s. Back then, best practice was to publish short pieces of content (blogs) as frequently as possible to get found by your company’s ideal buyer personas. Each blog was to incorporate a different longtail keyword. Links and calls‑to‑action (CTAs) from blogs to landing pages with forms completed the marketing funnel, giving your business a method for attracting visitors and converting them to leads for your database so that you could email them.
Yodelpop’s experience working with clients confirmed what we were being told was best practice in content marketing: To go from basically no organic traffic to ranking for relevant keywords, attracting visitors, and building a database of leads required many companies to publish 104 blogs every year.
That’s a lot of content.
And publishers were rewarded for their productivity. Traffic did increase, and if CTAs were in place, businesses were now able to generate leads from people who were interested in their content.
To many of us, the fact that search is rewarding well‑organized content is a big relief. Generating as many blogs as possible squanders resources that we could be channeling toward all of the other activities it takes to run a successful business. Instead, companies now can plan content using topic clusters to tell a whole story that makes the case for their products and services while answering people’s questions, as validated by search data.
A topic cluster is a group of content centered on one big topic that is an important part of your company’s story. A healthcare provider for seniors might have a topic cluster on dementia care:
Below, we’re going to reverse‑engineer this topic cluster to show you how it was built. You can use the same steps to build a topic cluster for your own company. In the process, you’ll be planning a pillar page and a set of blogs to support it. This content will be strategically planned to attract your buyer personas to your website, educate them on a crucial aspect of your mission, and engage them in taking action on that mission by becoming a customer.
Planning topic clusters for your company involves choosing a set of big topics that:
- Your buyer personas are asking questions about
- Are important to your mission
Start by looking back at your content mission, described above. What do you want your buyer personas to know how to do? Can you divide that answer into a set of bullet points? Our sample company’s content mission looks like this:
Our mission is to provide high‑quality assistive care with compassion and respect, but when it comes to our content strategy, it’s not about doing that, it’s about the idea that everyone should know how to:
- Provide excellent care for an aging parent (for family caregivers) or the seniors in their care (for professional caregivers)
- Successfully manage and reduce caregiver stress
- Find and choose high‑quality senior care providers
With your content mission in front of you, you can move on to draft your first topic cluster. Some key components of a topic cluster include:
- Head term
- Core topic
- Subtopic
Head Term
A head term is a top‑level phrase with a high monthly search volume that supports your programs/services. From the final portion of your content mission, draft a list of head terms. Looking at the first bullet point in our example, we know it’s important to us that family caregivers know how to provide excellent care for an aging parent. Based on our work in this field, we know that dementia is one of the big topics that caregivers need information on.
Our keyword research tells us dementia gets 673,000 searches per month. It’s a fine head term — we’re just using it to group our content in a way that makes sense to our company, not to compete with anyone for search.
Core Topic and Pillar Page
Next comes our core topic. You’ll most likely be generating a number of core topics under a single head term. A core topic represents a topic that’s smaller than your head term, but still a big topic in relative terms, considering your overall content mission. It is a longtail keyword, three to five words long, that is a phrase used by one or more of our key personas to research a topic that they’re especially interested in.
Use the challenges and goals portions of your personas to determine your core topics, and consider carefully the fact that your content mission is to make sure your personas possess specific pieces of knowledge. When it comes to search volume, as a rule of thumb, the search term you’re targeting for your core topic (we’ll call this the core term) will have monthly searches in the thousands — less than your head term, and usually more than your subtopics (see below).
Within dementia, our head term, our content mission requires us to deliver content that helps our personas provide excellent care to a relative or patient, so dementia care could be our core term. This term comes in at 6,600 searches per month, so it seems to qualify. But to really make sure, we need to look at the practical application of this core term — how we plan to use it. We need to look at how it would work as the keyword for — and topic of — a pillar page.
A core term is at the center of a pillar page on your website. This is the long, authoritative page that, if it’s done right, Google will reward your business for publishing. If your core term isn’t pillar page material, it’s best to go back and come up with another one.
How can you tell if your core term will make for a good pillar page keyword?
Start by Googling the term and looking at the first page of search results. Answer this one question: Can your company make a page that is ten times better than the ten pages you see listed (ignore the ads at the top)?
What does it mean to make a page that is ten times better? It’s not just about the design or the content. It’s a combination of the two. Here are some of the elements of a successful pillar page:
- Long, authoritative content: 2,000 words at a minimum — you cannot have too much content, as long as it’s valuable to your persona and relevant to the core topic and the page is designed well
- Embedded video
- Great user experience (is it easy to find and use all of the content?)
- Excellent mobile as well as desktop interface
- A menu just for that page, using anchor titles in subheads
- Graphics such as infographics and photos
- Inline CTAs
- Form to download the page content as PDF
- Share buttons
- Perfect SEO: optimized titles, subheads, meta descriptions, image tags and file names, content, etc.
When evaluating whether you can compete with an existing page, don’t look at just one measure of success, such as length. One way you can win is by finding gaps in other pages and filling them on your page. Also, look at the outright quality of the content through your customers’ eyes. Do you have access to stories, data, images, etc., that your competitors don’t have, because of the nature of your business, products, or services? This is where your mission can make you shine.
If you find that the core term you’re considering has too much competition, move on; find a core topic where you can win. Don’t waste your resources creating more noise online. Look for chances to provide value—even if your next core term has lower monthly searches. You’ll be narrowing your audience to a niche group that can really benefit from your message and engage meaningfully with your company.
Once you have a core topic that you’re planning to build a pillar page around, it’s time to decide on some subtopics within that same topic cluster. These are going to become the keywords for your blogs (you can also build other content around them, like web pages and videos). And these blogs (and other pieces of content) are all going to contain links to the pillar page. Because the goal here is to boost traffic to the pillar page — and to the topic cluster as a whole.
If you’ve used blogging as a marketing strategy for your business in the past, you already know a lot about writing blogs around a keyword. In case you’re new to the task, here are the basics:
- Create a list of questions that your ideal customers have, which are specific aspects or facets of your core topic, based on their challenges and problems — you should have many sources of these, including your customers and sales and service staff
- Each one of these questions is a potential subtopic — it will be the subject of a blog, with its own unique keyword
- Use your favorite keyword tool (there are several listed above) to find the keywords users are entering to find information on these issues, along with related searches, and the average monthly search
- Enter potential subtopic keywords into Google and use the results to determine what demand there is for this content, and to generate more ideas. Look at:
- Autocomplete: What is Google entering for you?
- The first page of the search engine result listings: Can you create better content than what you see there?
- Synonyms, similar phrases, and lots of different ways of asking the same question
Subtopic keywords can be relatively low in traffic, with monthly search volume in the hundreds, or even less. The key is to answer the right questions to address your personas’ challenges and goals and to achieve your content mission.
In the case of our topic cluster example, under our core term of dementia care, we’ve decided to start with these subtopics as keywords for our blogs:
- dementia caregiver stress
- how to talk to a parent with dementia
- activities for people with dementia
- stages of dementia
- dementia caregiver tips
- types of dementia
- dementia caregivers toolbox
- caring for parent with dementia at home
Each blog needs to be as perfectly optimized for search engines as your pillar page, including your keyword in: the page title (in an H1 tag), subheads (in H2 and H3 tags), meta descriptions, image tags, image file names, and — of course — the content. However, gone are the days of keyword stuffing — search engines will penalize you for it, and so will your visitors. Use the keyword naturally — which argues for choosing a keyword that makes that possible.
Remember you are writing for the human, not the search engine.
Each subtopic is a step toward increasing visibility and traffic for the pillar page it is connected to; make it relevant so that your pillar page link will be completely natural in the blog.
In many cases, especially if you’re creating all of your content from scratch, all of the subtopic blogs combined will essentially comprise the content of your pillar page. But each piece has to work on its own, so keep in mind that each blog will need to be customized.
Once you know what the subtopics (blog topics) in your topic cluster are going to be, you need to generate content. For a busy marketing team, that can seem like a barrier, but it may not be as hard as you think. Here’s a quick list of possible sources of blog content. They may require some work to adapt into blogs, but in some cases, you should be able to virtually cut and paste:
- Sales and promotional materials
- Product and service documentation
- Webinars or presentations by your staff or partners — transcribe and edit them, embedding the video for even better traffic
- Articles from your enewsletter
- Case studies sharing success stories and metrics
- Emails written to individuals in response to their questions
- Personal stories of your customers — place a form on your website soliciting these
- Social media — further develop posts your team has written, or replies to comments that they’ve crafted
- Interviews
- Old blog posts — find disparate blog posts and combine them to increase their combined traffic — just make sure to create redirects or you could lose, rather than gain, traffic. (If you’re doing this, it’s best to enlist the help of a professional versed in repurposing content. At Yodelpop, we’ve developed a whole process for consolidating content and repurposing it for higher traffic and conversion — feel free to contact us to learn more about it.)
While your business has the expertise in your products and services and the problems they solve, you may not have professional writers. Hiring a content marketing firm that specializes in topic clusters and all that they involve is one solution; they can draw from your materials, interviews with your staff and experts, and additional research to create the content your customers are looking for. If you don’t have the resources to hire professionals, create a simple assignment template that clearly lists the parameters of the blog assignment (word count, topic, use of the keyword, required link to pillar page, required subheads and bullets, etc.) and fill it out every time you ask someone to write for your blog.
How many subtopics will you need? In the end, the number of subtopics you generate (and blogs you create) to be in your topic cluster will depend on how much your personas want to know — and, of course, how much content and expertise your business has on the subject. While quantity is still important, it has taken second place to quality in the new SEO.
The difference between the old way of keyword‑based blogging and blogging that’s based on topic clusters is this: All of your blogs will now be working together to drive traffic to a pillar page. Traffic to the entire topic cluster is what matters most, not traffic to any single blog.
Rather than looking at traffic to any one blog as your main metric of success with content marketing, you can now consider how the whole topic cluster is doing at (1) attracting traffic and (2) converting visitors to leads (with calls‑to‑action, on‑page forms, and pop‑up forms).
