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What is a blog and why are they important?

Written by Lisa Spalding | 10-Jun-2019 15:30:00

Are you struggling for ideas of what to write for your blog? Regular blog / newsreel updates are an essential component for keeping your audiences engaged, ensuring your website has regular, relevant content and is a great asset as part of your Inbound Marketing strategy.

Regular blog posts are also essential tools which act as 'Cluster Content' for your 'Topic Clusters' around your 'Pillar Pages' , all boosting your website's search engine optimisation (SEO).

Content marketers are constantly battling for the attention of their audience. With increased amounts of content being published online, search engines like Google are being forced to better organise and showcase the content they think would be helpful to the searcher. 

What is  a Topic Cluster?

Topic clusters are groups of related web pages on a chosen topic that all link to one core pillar page. Organising your site content into topic clusters helps search engines distinguish your area of expertise and better understand the relationship between these pages.

Creating a topic cluster involves three main components:

  • • A pillar page
  • • Cluster topic content or subtopics
  • • Hyperlinks between the two
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What is a Pillar Page?

The pillar page is at the core of the cluster and serves as the authority page for the core topic you aim to rank for.

Educational resource pages or your company services pages can work as pillar pages.

Say you sell hot water bottles, and your goal is to rank for “keeping warm in bed.” In the topic cluster scenario, your pillar page would be an in-depth resource covering the core questions a searcher would have on this topic.

So what is Cluster Topic Content?

Cluster Topic Content focuses on long-tail queries that relate to your core topic, often in the form of blog posts. By linking your subtopic pages to a pillar page, you’re signalling to search engines that the pillar page is the authoritative resource on your primary topic.

In the same example, you might create a subtopic page on the topic “staying warm in bed” to help readers calculate how long they can expect their hot water bottle to keep them warm in their bed based around a number of varying factors.

This video contains a more detailed explanation of Topic Clusters and why they are important as part of your SEO strategy.

Watch Video:

Blog Topic Generator Tool

So now you know why it is important to have a regularly updated blog, here's a link to a Free Blog Topic Generator Tool to help you with ideas.