As a reaction to limited traffic and engagement, one’s initial reaction may be to overproduce material and inundate search engines with keywords and haphazard topics in order to cast a wide net that would theoretically drive up individual engagement.

Unfortunately, using more or popular keywords to drive up search engine optimisation rarely works. Consider this: the entire point of using specific words or phrases is to increase participation, but with obvious, basic or unrelated keywords, your content is just entering into an overfished pond and it’s far less likely to stand out to customers or visitors.

A more effective approach

One possibility is utilising topics or building a system of terms and phrases that relate to each other and to your content (Hubspot). This limits the scope of your engagement with keywords, but covers a larger swath of individuals who may choose different keywords related to but not directly targeting your content. Topics will help you expand your reach.

How to build a topic

In order to build a topic for your content, you first have to start with a single integral concept and have that be the idea that the rest of the keywords you use relate back to. Choose something broad enough to have a lot of options, e.g. “swimming” rather than “swimming pools” or “Jacuzzis”. Then, interconnect a number of related concepts that branch off of that one main topic. So following this example: “swimming” would relate to “swimming pools”, “Jacuzzis”, “pool cleaning products”, “competitive swimming”, “swimming exercises”, “swimsuits” and other related concepts. This is called a topic cluster.

Understanding topic clusters

When you develop a topic cluster, effectively you are driving more visitors or customers to your content by providing a multitude of possibly related suggestions to your original product. Make sure that you monitor the success of each cluster (in order to review and refine each topic), but if one topic cluster appears to have more overall success than another topic cluster that you’re using, you don’t have to go through and parse which individual terms and phrases are or are not working. This takes time and energy, but refining and simplifying or enhancing successful topic clusters will allow you to take less time monitoring or adjusting your topics and keywords.

For more tips and suggestions for content creation, get in touch with ALHAUS. As the leading content management experts, we can help you develop your topics so you can expand the reach of your content and get more value out of your keywords.