One of my main focuses for SEO strategies is always on the content. Get this piece correct, optimized, well-chosen, and correctly linked and the benefit will be visible in a few months.

Choosing the right topics, based on smart keyword research and in-demand queries and search phrases, will enable you to build out a content ‘silo’ with informative and relevant content that your reader is looking for. Correctly bringing this content together and interlink it to one another, will establish a content pilar of content that has the ability to rank really well and generate a lot of organic traffic.

I have seen great success with several of my clients, where we were able to quadruple their organic traffic in about a year.

Add conversion optimization techniques to the mix and you’ll have the recipe for success.

Here is a study that I found particularly interesting:

How I created a Topic Cluster and boosted my website traffic by 1000%

In April 2020, I ran a small SEO experiment and transformed a long-form article into a topic cluster (also called content hub). 

The goal: I wanted to see if I will get more traffic by splitting the long-form content into a set of smaller pages linked together and organized hierarchically in my website.

Each newly created page will focus on a specific section and a subtopic of the initial article.

I don’t want to keep the suspense too long (any way you’ve read the title, so you know the end of the story.)

Indeed, it was a successful update of a long-form article into a topic cluster.

Before the start of the experiment, the page generated about 50 page views per week. 

Now the topic cluster makes almost 2’000 page views per week and generated 16’000 page views between May 2020 and October 2020.

It is a growth of 1000% compared to the four months before the update.

This section of my website is now generating 10 times more visits, and it keeps on growing.

You can see that the result are amazing, a couple of week after the
update I got an increase of impressions in Google Search (for the topic
of the cluster) and more visits to my website.

At the end of the article, I will share more statistics, the number
of keywords won, the ranking of the page on Google, and the traffic
growth. (If you are a data nerd, you will love it).

But before, let me give more details about the process:

• How I analyzed the long-form article
• How I defined the topics of the cluster
• How I used Google Search Console to unveil opportunities
• How I managed the internal links between the pages
• How I published the page and handled the redirection and deindexation in Google

If you plan to create a content cluster or if you want to update some old content on your website, this article will give you great insights and a step by step approach.

Read the study here

Credit: Samuel Schmitt