写有莱斯利,马修·巴比（Matthew Barby）,Anum Hussain， 和Cambria Davies
TL;DR:Influential search engines like Google have changed their algorithm to favor topic-based content. As a result, SEOs are exploring a new way of linking related content under a "topic clusters" model. This report serves as a tactical primer for marketers responsible for SEO strategies.
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While you cheerfully (or apathetically) browse the web, many companies are quietly reconfiguring their webpages in the background. Why? Because competition today to get found in search engine results is intense, and as a result, SEO practices have evolved to a new model being leveraged by many content-focused websites.
SEO现在正在转移到主题群集模型，其中单个“支柱”页面充当了总体主题的内容中心和与同一主题链接回到支柱页面以及彼此相关的多个内容页面。该链接动作信号与搜索引擎表明柱子页面是该主题的权威，并且随着时间的流逝，该页面的涵盖主题可能越来越高。本质上，主题群集模型是一种使用清洁和更故意的站点体系结构来组织网站内容页面的方式。
Source: Matt Barby
Watch the video below to learn more about the topic cluster methodology:
Search Engines Are Forcing SEOs to Adapt
Changing behavior is the primary driver behind the topic cluster approach. But marketers and SEO experts are not going through the tedious process of overhauling their site structure just to get ahead of consumer behavior. They’re being forced to becausesearch engines为了响应消费者的行为变化而改变了算法。
几年前，人们提出了零碎的关键字查询来搜索引擎以查找其问题的答案。如今，大多数人都可以向搜索引擎提出复杂的问题，他们期望获得准确，及时的结果。想要一个特定答案的搜索者在查询中还使用许多不同的短语。现在，搜索引擎足够聪明，可以识别查询之间的连接。算法已经演变为可以理解搜索意图背后的主题上下文，将其与他们过去遇到的类似搜索联系起来，并提供最好回答查询的网页。
与这一变化有关的第一个大型改组是Google的Hummingbird update in 2013. The search algorithm began parsing out phrases rather than focusing solely on keywords. Many SEO professionals see Hummingbird as Google’s official switch from a keyword to a topic focus.
The next major step toward reliance on topics occurred with Google’sRankBrainupdate. Launched in 2015, RankBrain is Google’s machine learning algorithm designed to understand the context of people’s search queries. It associates past searches with similar themes and pulls multiple keywords and phrases that are associated with the search query to find the best results.
In light of these algorithm changes, HubSpot’s Anum Hussain and Cambria Davies launched topic cluster experiments for a select group of topics in 2016. The最初的主题集群实验中的广泛发现showed that the more interlinking they did, the better the placement in search engine results pages (SERPs). Impressions (or views) also increased with the number of links they created.
Source: Anum Hussain and Cambria Davies
What Does This Mean for my Website?
Before the shift to topic clusters, HubSpot’s website structure looked like the image below. The master URL hosts the homepage and links to subdomains or subdirectories. Using HubSpot as an example, you can see the spread of web pages within our blog subdomains. As HubSpot produces more content, blog pages proliferate and the structure becomes spread out and complex, with no uniform linking structure in place.
This setup makes it harder for search engines to crawl through all the pages quickly. Further, HubSpot, and many similar businesses that invest in content, find themselves with dozens of web pages that cover similar topic areas. All these pages end up competing with each other to get found by search engines, and ultimately, the searcher. A more orderly, thoughtful arrangement is needed -- one that tells search engines what page should be prioritized and displayed for a main topic and then organizes all the pages related to that topic in one interlinked cluster.
Source: Matt Barby
Topic clusters rearrange the architecture to look more like the image below, where clusters of content that cover a topic area link to a central pillar page that definitively -- yet broadly -- outlines the topic. By linking all internal content within that topic to a pillar page, search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yandex can easily scan all the content and understand thatthere is a semantic relationship between the pages' content.群集设置还表示搜索引擎表明内容中有真正的广度和深度，这使支柱页面具有更多的主题权限。像Google Rankbrain这样的算法奖励了这种有序的链接与更高的搜索位置的联系。
Source: Matt Barby
How Do I Create a Topic Cluster?
让我们以“内容营销”为例。审核您现有的内容页面，并按主题重点进行分组。如果需要，请在内容营销上创建一个支柱页面，该页面在单个页面中捕获主题的所有关键方面（请参见下面的示例）。
示例主题功能:Content Marketing
- Content Marketing Strategy
- 头脑风暴技术
- 博客ging
- 博客ging Mistakes
- Buyer Personas
- Writing Skills
- Writing Productivity
- Buyer’s Journey
- 遗传算法ted Content
- 不断增长的读者
- Content Planning
- 内容创建工具
- 博客Post Topics
- Grammar Fails
- Post Types
- 缩放内容输出
请注意，支柱页面需要广泛介绍您的主题，以便与与之链接的所有群集内容联系在一起是有意义的。您创建或优化的群集内容应在支柱页面上提到的一个区域中深入。例如：如果您在搜索引擎优化方面有一个支柱页面，则群集内容页面将详细说明如何优化搜索引擎的站点体系结构。
The key is to think of your content assets in terms of topics you want your business to compete in, rather than discrete keywords. The keywords can still play into your overall strategy, but topics are now the umbrella under which your keyword strategy operates.
莱斯利, who undertook overhauling a large number of HubSpot’s content pages into clusters, sums up the art of choosing topics for clusters:
“在考虑是否应称为支柱页面时，请问自己：此页面是否会回答搜索X关键字的读者的每个问题，并且它足够广泛，可以成为20-30篇文章的伞？
A good sniff test here is -- if you’re trying to get the page you’re working on to rank for a long-tail keyword, it’s not a pillar page. If the page you’re working on explores a very narrow topic in great depth, it’s not a pillar page. If the page you’re working on touches on many aspects of a broad topic, it’s probably a pillar page.”
In the example below, if you wanted to own the term “inbound marketing,” you would research related topics or long-tail keywords, create content on those subtopics, and then link back to an inbound marketing pillar page to create your cluster.
Once you have a designated pillar page, update the links in the related content pages you’ve identified to form a “cluster” around the pillar page. Every post in the cluster set needs to be linked to at least once with the same anchor text (the part that is hyperlinked) so that a search engine knows it’s part of a topic cluster. Over time, monitor the pillar page's ranking within search engines. When your ranking stabilizes and you’ve grown your authority on the topic, you can take the chain of clusters further by linking out to a related topic. A natural follow up cluster to the “content marketing” topic could be the next step in the content marketing process, such as how to create content that converts.
结论：开始主题群的战术技巧
Choosing a topic to focus on and building out cluster content plans can be daunting, and auditing historical content can be downright painful, especially if your company has an extensive archive. We have a few suggestions to organize and create topic clusters today.
- Map out five to ten core problems that your buyer persona has. Use surveys, run interviews, and do some secondary research within online communities as needed to gather the data.
- Group each of the problems into broad topic areas.
- Build out each of the core topics with subtopics using keyword research.
- Map out content ideas that align with each of the core topics and corresponding subtopics.
- 通过行业和竞争研究来验证每个想法。
- 创建内容，衡量影响和完善。
To keep track of content and links within a topic cluster, teams can set up a sheet like the one below. Depending on the complexity of the topic and the number of pages you’re linking to, some of the categories may not be necessary.
The categories to track are:
- Page URL
- Cluster topic
- Subcluster (if applicable)
- Keyword to rank for
- 它链接到支柱页面吗？（Y/N）
- Is it relinked (if applicable)? (Y/N)
- Any other other actions needed
- Has the other action been taken yet? (Y/N)
- Links out to pages 1, 2, 3, and/or 4
- 它也是一个子支柱页面（如果适用）？（Y/N）
Help is On The Way
许多公司还在开发工具来帮助营销团队组织围绕主题的内容。市场上的点解决方案，例如MarketMuse,标识内容差距，并可以通过主题群集来组织和优化内容。
Source: MarketMuse
集线器也有一个Content Strategy toolto help customers help create, execute, and measure content in topics. Machine learning helps marketers identify the cluster topics (or long-tail keywords) that their target personas typically search for and offers subtopic suggestions. Soon, there will be more tools to help SEOs and marketers create topic clusters and maximize their content strategies.
Source: HubSpot
This report contains links for HubSpot Content, Products, and Services.
Originally published May 10, 2017 9:00:00 AM, updated July 28 2021