You may be missing a trick if you've been writing blog posts for your business or website for a while but aren't seeing the organic traffic growth you'd hoped for.

There are a variety of strategies you can use to boost your organic traffic. Cluster Content is one of the better ways to do this, and it's something that most large businesses and marketers are doing.

Cluster content is created when you choose a primary topic related to your business, such as 'ecommerce' for EKM, and then create a cluster of content around that topic. Of course, you don't just want random content ideas; you want targeted, SEO-focused content.

This example illustrates the cluster content method in a more visual way. The idea is that the content is organized in a specific way via your blog navigation and internal linking so that search engines like Google can more easily crawl your content and see how each piece is related to the others.

Many businesses are adopting this new method, which arose as a result of Google's algorithm change favoring topic-based content.

How to get started with your own cluster content

Before you begin researching and writing your blog content, consider whether this approach is appropriate for your company. Begin by asking yourself the following questions:

• Is the topic you'd like to rank for popular enough that it's worth your time?

• Do you have any existing content on the subject? Is it possible to optimize it and use it within your cluster content, or do you have to rely on internal links?

  • Is the subject you've chosen something you can go into depth about? You'll almost certainly need to write a lot of content, to the point where you'll need to go into great detail with some of it.

  You'll have a great starting point for your cluster content if you can answer these initial questions.

  Map out your clusters

  Following that, you'll need to map out your cluster content using a simple process. To begin, write down 5-10 issues that your ideal customer faces and group them into broad topic areas. After that, you'll want to do some keyword research to fill in the gaps in each of your topic areas. Choose keywords with a lot of traffic but aren't too difficult to rank for.

  Next, check to see if the content you're creating is validated by looking at what your competitors are doing and what is already ranking well for your keywords. Finally, using your blog's navigation and internal linking structure, sketch out how your content cluster will function and appear.

  This may necessitate some additional work to ensure that your blog and navigation structure are both capable of accommodating your new cluster content strategy.

  Create and Assess

  Finally, now that you've completed all of your research and planning, you can begin creating content for your first cluster. Make sure you're following current SEO best practices, such as word count, keyword research for each piece, alt tag completion, and a good mix of internal and external linking.

  As long as the topic cluster is highly relevant to your website or business, you can repeat this process for a few different topic clusters. Make certain you're answering all of your customers' questions.

  However, you'll need to analyze and measure your impact to see if your strategy is working. This could include checking to see if your blog's cluster content has increased traffic. If any of those cluster pages are assisting you in gaining conversions, and if any of them are ranking well for their target keyword.

  Remember to optimize content as needed and to update any date-sensitive blogs so that your readers always have access to the best and most up-to-date information.

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