So you want to learn about keyword clusters? Great, you’ve landed in the right place!
With the proliferation of the internet, in came some of the greatest opportunities that man has ever encountered. From the comfort of your home, you could put your product on the internet, and make a little cash. And considering the huge amount of people who surf the internet, that amount of cash could be quite mouthwatering.
Well, that’s the general idea of how it should be. In the actual sense, that’s something that will only happen when you’ve put in some serious amounts of hard work because you are not the only one who wants to make money while they’re in their undies.
The hard work in this case, isn’t about trumpeting your product to all that are within earshot, it’s about making your product pages visible to people who are crawling the internet. And these people crawling the internet are usually searching for a solution to a need that they have. It’s up to you to figure out how to connect your solution to their need, and there’s a generally easy way to do this.
In comes search engine optimization. Here is a process that enables you to make your website and its products and solutions immediately available to the searcher by matching their search intent to the solutions you provide.
And it’s not just about providing a solution, it’s about working hard to come before your competitors in the SERPs (search engine result pages), otherwise they will get all the clicks while you wallow in oblivion. And this is where keyword clusters come in.
What exactly are keyword clusters?
Before getting into the explanation of what a keyword cluster is, it would be prudent to first take a look at what a keyword is.
Keywords explained.
When a user is going online to make a search, they won’t do it using arbitrary terms, or even just communicate to Google or other search engines purely in machine code or, God forbid, emojis. They will use natural language to make a query.
The search may be something similar to “Best restaurant in Seattle” or “Largest shoe store in Hoboken”. In such a case, the search engine will bring up results with links to pages that contain those words, or if not available, something similar or close to.
The terms that a searcher will use to query a search engine are what are called keywords. What this means for you is that if you want your business or blog to succeed and become available to searchers, you have to do research related to the niche you are in, and tailor your pages and content to these keywords.
In the earlier years, all you needed to do to appear at the top of search results was to stuff your pages with keywords that had the greatest number of searches. This guaranteed that you would always have visitors to your page. However, Google and other search engines caught on to this, and attempting this today would mean suicide on your business or blog’s part.
This led to the need to do thorough keyword research before you included those keywords in your pages so as to avoid the many penalties Google proffers on spammy websites. All you needed to do was to take your time to research, and come up with the best quality keywords that would make it onto your page.
And now here is where the other issues come in. Keyword stuffing is very dangerous for a website as any penalty your website received would mean a loss in visibility to searchers. What you would be left to do is use the keyword one or two times on a page.
There are other factors to SEO and if competitors did better on these other factors, that means that their websites would be placed higher than yours on search engine results pages. To those who don’t know much, that would mean stagnation in how they would operate, but that’s not you.
You are an intrepid business person and you are doing all you can to put your website at the top. That is why you are conducting thorough research on how to make it to the top. For your efforts, you came across the term keyword clustering and want to know more about it.
Now, as you are conducting your keyword research, you will have seen., or you will come to see that not every person will use the exact same terms to make a search. They will use terms that are similar, but the intent of the search is similar. This is why when you do keyword research, you will encounter a variety of keywords that are variations of each other. What mattered before was the number of clicks that a keyword had.
And that’s how webmaster used to do things before. They would take the keywords and build different pages for each of those keywords. At the time, search engine algorithms weren’t as advanced as they are now, and frankly that’s too much work, considering duplicate content is a sin according to Google’s commandments.
With the advancement of the algorithm, you are now sitting on a goldmine. No longer do you have to use a single keyword per page. You can now use different variations of a keyword on a single page. This is what is referred to as keyword clustering.
How to do keyword clustering.
The thing about keyword clustering is you won’t just open your favorite keyword research tool, type in text and write what interests you off of the results list. You will have to use some tact to get things done.
Collect keywords.
As a prudent webmaster, you have to do your research before coming up with content. As part of your research, you will pick a good number of keywords that will help you in the steps that are to follow.
It would be great to note that in this step, you will have to look at quantity over quality. From here, you can then whittle them down to a number that is guaranteed to give you the results that you desire.
Group your keywords in clusters.
Here comes the part where you will need to put in a bit of elbow grease. Of course, while conducting your research, you will come across a great number of keywords, all offering great opportunities, but you’re not there yet.
You will have to go through the keywords to group them. And no, you don’t have to do it manually. The first way you can do this is to use a spreadsheet, as SEOs would. With a spreadsheet, you can then use a frequency counter, whether by word or by phrase, as the first form of sorting.
From here, you can then go through the sorted list and figure out which words of phrases belong to which group and group them. A simple way to do this is to group them by topic.
While using a spreadsheet would be great exercise for your brain, you just may not have all the time in the world to do this. As such, you can rely on a free keyword clustering tool. One of these is WordStream Keyword Grouper which gives you the option of 30 free searches, conducted once daily and it will sort the list for you.
While free tools are great, most tend to come with limits, unless you upgrade to a paid version, and here’s where the game changes as there are a great number of paid tools available for you to use. One of these is the venerable SpyFu.
Get down to business.
After you get your keywords clustered, now you can get down to business. There are various ways in which you can put clustered keywords to good use. One of the best ways to do it is to create new content using the clusters you’ve created. This will help you target various keywords and the fresh content is something that search engines love.
From here, you can then update content that is already existing on your website. The new keywords will work to give them a boost in terms of SEO. Also, your site structure could do with some keyword clustering love.
Why do you need to use keyword clustering?
At this moment in time, there are at least 10 other competitors out there. You will need a special weapon if you are going to dislodge them from the top of search engine results pages, the place where they get all the clicks from searchers.
If you’re going to beat them, implementing keyword clustering on your website will mean that you are able to target more keywords. Thus, for a single page, multiple keywords will mean that that page will experience an increase in traffic. This in turn will help boost your rankings, and the effect will keep on happening as Google tends to promote pages that a lot of people are visiting.
Organic traffic can be a real boost to your business, helping you save thousands in marketing costs.
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