What Is Keyword Clustering?
Keyword clustering refers to the process of creating a group of keywords that are semantically linked to target a page, rather than just focusing on one targeted keyword.
What Are the Different Kinds of Clustering?
There are two main types of clustering:
1. Soft Clustering
Soft clustering, otherwise known as fuzzy clustering is where a data point (in this case keywords and phrases) can belong to multiple clusters at the same time.
2. Hard Clustering
With hard clustering, a data point belongs entirely to one cluster.
Why Is Keyword Clustering Important?
Keyword clustering significantly improves a website’s SEO strategy. Search engines are now more advanced and able to comprehend context and keyword synonyms, and so they rank pages for groups of keywords instead of single keywords.
Introduction of the Google Hummingbird Algorithm in 2013, saw Google begin to phase out its focus on keywords, and instead focus on topics, and better understand the intent behind a query.
Aiming to target a range of keywords and phrases, rather than just one, allows a website to establish more reach and better visibility, through improving its ranking and traffic.
Keyword clustering also forces a company or brand to examine their website in depth, and create content that is more extensive and thorough. This means higher quality content, which leads to an improved UX (User Experience).
How To Conduct Keyword Clustering
There are a few steps you need to take when conducting your keyword clustering strategy.
1. Gather Your Keywords
The first step to keyword clustering is quality keyword research. Review your website, brand or company, and ask who your audience are and what they are seeking. Conduct competitor research, look at what keywords they are ranking for.
Aim to gather as many keywords as possible, you’ll condense them later on.
2. Enter Your Keywords Into Groups
Once you have found your keywords, you should organise them into groups. You can either do this manually or using a tool.
If you opt for the manual route, use a spreadsheet to analyse how often each keyword is searched for, ask which are the most important, and divide them into topics.
Alternatively there are a variety of online tools, both free and paid for that you can use in order to create your keyword clusters. These include:
3. Integrate Them Into Your Content
Once you’ve gone through the process of finding and grouping your keywords, you need to integrate them into your content.
This could be through creating fresh content that targets a range of your clustered keywords, or revamping old content with your new keyword clusters.
You should also integrate keyword clusters to boost your on-page SEO, this includes meta-data, alt-text, and headers.
How Can We Help?
Overwhelmed by the task ahead to get a grip of your keyword strategy? We can help you with that - get in touch and we can talk you through the salient issues in a free strategy session.
You could then potentially be paired with an awesome team to help you implement your plans!
Not looking for a team right now? You could always head to our training courses instead where you could learn all the SEO practises needed for yourself and implement them as soon as you’ve completed the course!
