What Are Topic Clusters in SEO? Content Strategy 2025

Definition: Pillar Pages, Cluster Content, and Internal Linking

Pillar Page

A pillar page acts as a central hub. It provides a comprehensive overview of a broad subject and then links to pages that provide more specific, detailed content. 

Examples of topics covered in a pillar page for businesses in different industries include:

• Types of car accident injuries.
• Types of car accidents.
• What to do when someone uses your intellectual property rights without your permission.
• Defending yourself when charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.
• Social media marketing.
• Search engine optimization (SEO).
• Your guide to professional teeth cleaning.
• What to know about teeth whitening.

Cluster Content (Supporting Pages)

These pages delve deeper into a topic. They discuss subtopics of the core topic, offering specific content. Businesses do this using blog posts, articles, and other types of content. Cluster pages then link back to the pillar page. 

Examples of content for supporting pages are:

• How head injuries sustained in a car accident can impact your life.
• Rear-end collisions: causes, injuries, and treatment.
• How to write a cease-and-desist letter.
• Are breathalyzers accurate?
• Instagram marketing.
• Local SEO strategies.
• Types of teeth cleanings.
• In-office vs. at-home teeth whitening.

Internal Linking

This is the practice of creating hyperlinks that connect different pages within the website. For example, as aforementioned, a pillar page provides links to supporting pages, which also link back to the pillar page, creating a structured network connecting all related content on a website.

It’s easier for search engines to crawl and index content when you use internal links, as they can understand the structure and hierarchy of your website. Additionally, a comprehensive coverage of a specific topic with internal links demonstrates to search engines that a website has topical authority. Accordingly, they will rank it higher because it’s regarded as valuable to users.

Internal linking also reduces click depth (the number of clicks it takes for a user or a search engine crawler to navigate from a website’s homepage to a specific page). This improves user experience and crawlability. 

The Shift From Keywords to Topics: Why Topical Authority Matters in 2025

The landscape of SEO is shifting from emphasizing keywords to topics in 2025. Keywords are still crucial in rankings, but a singular focus on individual keywords is becoming less effective compared to a website having a comprehensive understanding of a subject.

Numerous factors have contributed to this shift, with the primary one being the evolution of search engines. Search engines are now using AI to understand content, including the intent behind user queries and the context of web pages. Google’s E-E-A-T is another element that reflects the changes that search engines are implementing when ranking content.

Therefore, only using relevant keywords might no longer guarantee a top spot on search engine results pages (SERPs). Topical authority matters now more than ever. A website needs to demonstrate expertise on a subject for search engines to rank it higher. 

In 2023, Google officially discussed the introduction of “topic authority” in the context of news content. Google explained the use of this system in identifying publications with specific expertise in certain specialized topic areas to ensure users get relevant and valuable content. This is now being done on all types of content. Websites with topic authority are ranking higher on SERPs.

Semantic SEO has also evolved from keyword matching to a deeper understanding of search intent and context. Search engine algorithms now prioritize a network of interconnected content around a central topic. This makes it crucial to structure content in a hierarchical way that shows search engines how different concepts relate and their relevance to users.

Why Topic Clusters Are Indispensable for SEO Success

Boost Search Engine Visibility and Rankings

Topic clusters allow businesses to target both broad keywords (on the pillar content) and more specific, long-tail keywords (on the cluster content). This ensures a business attracts users searching using short and long-tail keywords, maximizing visibility.

Furthermore, the organized structure of topic clusters makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index a site. Search engine crawlers will identify the pillar page and then use the internal links to get to cluster pages, exploring specific subtopics. Efficient crawlability and indexing positively impact a website’s rankings.

When a website comprehensively covers a topic, it signals search engines that it has valuable content. Consequently, search engines will rank it higher as an authoritative source. Additionally, users are more likely to spend more time on a website that has comprehensive content. This indicates to search engines that the site has quality content. In turn, they will rank it higher.

Enhance User Experience and Site Navigation

Topic clusters allow users to easily get to other relevant pages by clicking links. This reduces the need to return to SERP. Moreover, by grouping related content, users have an improved browsing experience. 

Enhanced user experience and site navigation positively impact engagement metrics, which are usually considered by search engines when ranking websites. For instance, search engines consider dwell time (the duration between a user clicking on a search result and their return to the SERP). A longer dwell time means a user found a website’s content relevant, valuable, and engaging.

Bounce rate (the percentage of website visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page) is another crucial metric. Topic clusters reduce bounce rate by making it easier for users to move from one page to another. 

Improved user experience can lead to positive reviews, backlinks, and brand mentions — elements that can benefit a website even without impacting their rankings.

Build E-E-A-T and Brand Authority

Providing comprehensive content on a topic showcases expertise and credibility. When a website has topical authority, it can become the go-to source for content on a specific subject. This aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. Websites that demonstrate in-depth knowledge on a subject are ranked higher in search results.

Consistently providing quality content on subtopics of a main subject builds brand authority. Search engines and users are more likely to trust such a website. 

Streamline Content Production and Preventing Keyword Cannibalization

Organizing content around a central theme streamlines content production. This is because you get to identify key topics relevant to your business and audience, and then come up with subtopics. 

Topic clusters make content creation efficient. Instead of creating isolated pieces of content, you have a plan for creating interconnected pieces. This can also make it easier to identify content gaps, as you can determine the areas of a topic you have not created in-depth content about.

Additionally, topic clusters make it easier to plan content. For instance, after writing content for cluster pages, you can schedule when to publish it, after the pillar page is published, to maintain consistency.

Preventing keyword cannibalization is another benefit of topic clusters. When multiple pages on a website target the same or similar keywords, these pages can start to compete against each other on search results, which can lead to lower rankings for all pages because search engines might struggle to identify which of the pages is the most relevant to a user’s search query.

Topic clusters ensure each cluster page focuses on a particular topic and specific long-tail keywords, which can be variations or related terms to the broad keywords on the pillar page. This means two pages will not target the same keywords, eliminating the possibility of them competing against each other.

Step-By-Step: Building Your Topic Cluster Strategy

1. Identify Core Topics and Pillar Ideas

The first step to building your topic cluster strategy is brainstorming relevant themes aligned with your brand, business goals, and audience. Choose topics that are relevant to your products or services and ensure they support your business objective. 

You should also understand your audience’s demographics, interests, challenges, and goals to choose topics that offer the information they are already looking for when searching for businesses like yours.

Next, assess your existing content to identify the topics you have extensively covered and those you need to provide more content on. Consider using tools, like Google Search Console data, to identify high-performing content on your website to create subtopics around it.

Analyzing competitor content is another crucial way to identify core topics. Identify the topics your competitors are ranking for and those they have not covered. You should also conduct market research to know your audience’s specific needs and questions. If your business has a support team, ask them about the common questions they receive from clients.

It’s crucial to have criteria for selecting a pillar topic. Do you want to focus on broadness, relevance to product/service, uniqueness, search volume, or audience interest and trends? 

Note that you can have more than one criterion. For instance, you can choose a topic whose purpose is to result in a high search volume but also aligns with your business goals or answers your target audience’s questions. You can choose a pillar topic that will establish your business as an expert on the subject but also offers a unique perspective from what your competitors have covered.

2. Comprehensive Keyword Research and Intent Mapping

You should conduct keyword research for the topics you chose in the previous step. Start with seed keywords (short, broad terms). Typically, they are one or two words long and represent a wide topic. 

Create a list of keywords you already know that relate to your core topic. You can also use keyword research tools, such as SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool, Google autocomplete, and “people also ask” to find keywords related to your products or services, both short and long-tail.

At this stage, you also need to do intent mapping (the process of understanding the reason behind a user’s search query or interaction with your brand). It’s vital to know if a user’s intent is informational (they are looking to find information about a specific topic), navigational (they are trying to find a specific website or page), commercial (a user researching a product or service before making a purchase), or transactional (they are ready to make a purchase or complete a specific transaction).

The keywords users use when searching will help you determine their intent. A user with informational intent will use question words, like “what,” “how,” “why,” and “who.” Users with navigational intent search for brand names, specific website URLs, or page-specific terms. A user with commercial intent will use keywords, like “best,” “review,” “vs,” “cheap,” “top,” or “affordable.” Lastly, a user who is ready to make a transaction will use keywords, like “buy,” “purchase,” “order,” “shop,” or “subscribe.”

Understanding a user’s search intent helps you align that intent with specific content within a topic cluster. Your content on both pillar and supporting pages should align with the identified intent.

You also need to map content to the buyer’s journey stages. This means providing the right content for customers at each stage of their decision-making process. 

You need content for customers at the:

• Top of the funnel (ToFu): This is when a customer becomes aware of your brand. Content at this stage should be broad, covering general topics.
• Middle of the funnel (MoFu): This is when they show more interest in your brand. Content should be in-depth and specific to establish expertise and build trust.
• Bottom of the funnel (BoFu): This is when they are ready to make a purchase. Content should highlight benefits, provide offers, and address any remaining concerns.

Choose topics for the pillar and cluster pages that allow you to meet the needs of customers at every stage.

3. Structure Pillar Pages and Cluster Content

Now that you have identified core topics, listed keywords, and done intent and content mapping, you are ready to structure your pillar and cluster content.  

Your pillar page should have comprehensive coverage, covering a thorough introduction to the core topic. Organize your content with clear headings (H1, H2, H3, and so on) and integrate the primary broad keyword into the content. Additionally, include a table of contents to allow users to go to specific sections of the content to improve readability and user experience.

Once you have a pillar page, write content on the subtopics you came up with. Your cluster content should offer in-depth, specific content, and include long-tail keywords. Cluster pages should answer users’ questions comprehensively and have visuals to enhance understanding and engagement.

Ensure your pillar page seamlessly integrates cluster topics. It should link cluster pages and use words that guide users to more detailed subtopics. Your cluster pages should also link back to the pillar page.

4. Craft High-Quality, Multi-Format Content

Create high-quality content for both pillar and cluster pages. A high-performing pillar page has long-form content, typically 2,500 words, to provide a comprehensive coverage of the core topic.

Strategic linking is another best practice for pillar pages. Place internal links to cluster pages strategically. Use anchor texts (the clickable text in a hyperlink) that are descriptive and keyword-rich to help users and search engines understand the context of the linked page.

Other aspects to have on your pillar page are expert quotes, visuals, data, and strong calls to action (CTAs).

When it comes to cluster content, create more focused content that addresses content gaps. Use natural entities, such as people, places, or things, that search engines can use to understand the context of a page and the relationship between different pieces of content. 

Consider diversifying your content into webinars, videos, online courses, social media posts, and guest posts, while maintaining a consistent brand tone and quality across all formats. 

Diversifying allows you to increase audience reach and enhance brand awareness. Additionally, creating different content formats around a pillar page leads to stronger SEO performance.

Creating “human-first” content for pillar and cluster pages is crucial, even with AI tools. Content tailored to a human reader is more authentic and trustworthy, and meets Google’s E-E-A-T principles.

5. Implement a Robust Internal Linking Structure

As stated, bidirectional linking is critical in topic clusters. Link pillar content to cluster content and vice versa. Don’t forget to use descriptive and contextual anchor texts to provide context for both search engines and users. Also, place links where they naturally fit, and users are more likely to click on them. You don’t want to randomly scatter them.

A cluster page should include links to other relevant cluster pages. Sequential linking between cluster pages creates a more interconnected web of content, making it easier for users to continue exploring the different aspects of a topic, and for search engines to understand the relationship between pages.

You should regularly check internal links to identify broken ones and correct them. Broken links can lead to poor user experience and negatively impact your rankings.

6. Content Audit and Gap Analysis for Optimization

You should regularly audit your existing content to integrate it into clusters. These include finding pages with content relevant to a pillar page, identifying outdated information, and updating outdated details. After identifying an existing high-quality, relevant content to a particular group, have a link to it on the pillar page and provide a link to the pillar page within it.

Auditing content also entails reviewing the metrics of your cluster content, such as traffic, rankings, and page authority (PA), to identify underperforming content and make changes to improve it. 

Content audit involves identifying content gaps, such as missing subtopics, cannibalization, and outdated articles. 

In turn, you can take action steps, including:

• Updating outdated content.
• Consolidating multiple pages that cover similar topics or target the same keywords to avoid cannibalization.
• Redirecting links to pages that were moved to new URLs.
• Leaving as is for content that is performing well.
• Removing content that is no longer relevant or accurate if updating or consolidating is not an option.

Businesses should continuously conduct keyword research and competitive analysis for expansion. You should consistently develop new pillar and cluster pages.

Advanced Strategies and Future-Proofing SEO in 2025

Optimizing for AI-Driven Search and LLM Visibility

The digital landscape is shifting from traditional keyword-based search engines to more intelligent and intuitive answer engines. These AI-powered systems provide direct, concise answers to users’ questions. 

They consider semantic relevance (the degree to which a piece of content aligns with the user’s search intent) to rank websites. Thus, a website that provides relevant content using human language that can be interpreted by AI (natural language processing/NLP) is highly ranked on answer engines.

You also need to craft content that is snippet-friendly. This means content that is structured in a way that allows search engines to extract and display a featured snippet that answers a user’s query. 

Large language models (LLMs), the technology that powers the ability of AI to understand human language and generate human-quality text, find content by indexing, retrieval, and augmentation/generation. It identifies relevant content, retrieves it from the long-form piece of information, creates an augmented prompt, and provides an accurate answer. 

This means you should ensure your content is crawlable and understandable by LLMs. Use clear headings, concise language, and structured data (schema markup). Also, focus on creating content that understands user search intent to provide relevant answers to underlying questions.

It’s essential to write for humans first. Although you want LLMs to understand your content, you should focus on creating well-written content that your target audience understands and finds valuable. Consider using structured data to define entities to help search engines understand them and their relationships within your content.

You should also adapt to conversational search patterns with long-tail keywords, as there is a shift from short, generic keywords to longer, more specific ones. Ensure your content uses conversational phrases to reflect how humans naturally speak, allowing you to be visible to different types of audiences. These phrases are also crucial for voice search optimization because users usually use long-tail keywords during voice search. 

Role of Backlinks in a Topic Cluster Context

Other websites linking to your pillar or cluster pages signals to search engines that your website offers valuable content on a particular topic. It shows relevance and expertise. Accordingly, search engines will rank your pillar and cluster pages higher for the topic in question. 

Creating high-quality content increases the likelihood of reputable websites linking to your content. Other link building strategies are guest posting, influencer collaborations, creating data-driven content, broken link building, and social media promotion.

Video Content for Enhanced Engagement

As of 2025, video content continues to perform well in SEO. It’s potentially outperforming blogs in certain aspects. Billions of people watch videos on various platforms daily. Additionally, users engage more effectively with videos compared to other content formats, increasing dwell time.

Thus, to maintain high search engine rankings and increase brand awareness, you should have video content. 

It’s easier to repurpose video content. You can post a long video on YouTube, and then create shorter clips for Instagram and TikTok. You can then extract key statistics or data from the video and create visually appealing infographics to share on social media.

It’s important to optimize your videos using keywords in titles/descriptions to help search engines understand the video content. Additionally, use timestamps to allow users to quickly navigate to specific sections, transcripts to make your video accessible to everyone, and website links to drive traffic to your website.

Real-World Examples of Successful Topic Clusters

Here are real-world examples of websites that have successful topic clusters:

Backlinko’s “SEO Marketing” Clusters

Backlinko has a 57-page cluster that provides comprehensive information about SEO marketing. The cluster pages discuss SEO fundamentals, keyword research strategies, content optimization strategies, technical SEO, link building for SEO, user experience signals, SEO tools and software, advanced SEO strategies, and SEOquake. This content cluster ranks for thousands of keywords.

MoneyHelper’s Personal Finance Clusters

MoneyHelper has several cluster pages in their “Everyday Money” category. This content cluster provides in-depth information on banking and payments, budgeting, buying a car, credit, and insurance, making MoneyHelper a reliable source of information about personal finance.

The Spruce’s “Gardening and Plants” Section

The Spruce’s gardening category has a plant section that provides information about various plants organized alphabetically from A to Z. Users get to learn how to plant and care for numerous plants. 

7Shifts’ “Restaurant Costs” Guide

7Shifts, a team management platform for restaurants, has a pillar page covering the topic, “The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Costs,” with links to numerous cluster pages covering more specific content, such as opening a restaurant, costs of goods sold, menu design, and customer service.

Healthline’s “Allergies” Cluster

Healthline’s article “Everything You Need to Know About Allergies” acts as a pillar page with links to numerous cluster pages discussing different topics, including types of allergies, symptoms, causes, and treatments.

HubSpot’s “Inbound Marketing” Cluster

HubSpot has a pillar page on “Inbound Marketing” titled “What Is Inbound Marketing?” which links to several cluster pages discussing subtopics like helping a business grow better, creating great content, creating an SEO strategy, and social media listening.

Salesforce’s “CRM” Cluster

Salesforce’s CRM pillar page takes users to more specific content on what a CRM is, how to use it, how to increase productivity and grow revenue with AI capabilities, and so forth.

Conclusion

Topic clusters are a strategic imperative for online dominance. Having pillar and cluster content helps a business rank higher on search engines. Furthermore, it provides topical authority and improves user experience. 

It’s critical to implement topic clusters in your content strategy to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. The competitive advantage and long-term defensibility you will gain by crafting high-quality pillar and cluster content are integral to growing your business. You can start small and then scale with time.

Levy Online has specialists who help businesses create valuable pillar and content pages. We also offer services related to digital marketing in Las Vegas to help businesses stay competitive, including web development for SEO.