How organising your content can keep customers coming back
Have you heard about content clusters?
They’re all about strategic internal linking.
Creating little groups of content around a key topic.
You create a pillar page and link to and from it, offering multiple internal links to keep readers entertained, educated and on your site.
Benefits include more organised content, less overlap and more authority on a given topic and increased content production speed.
Sounds good right?
But where do you start?
And if your existing content is currently the blog equivalent of a hoarders boudoir, how do you organise your content into clusters?
Today we’ll answer these questions and many more.
Tune in to learn
- What content clusters are
- What the benefits of using content clusters are
- How to choose your cluster topics
- Must-haves for your content clusters
- Common mistakes to avoid
- How to measure the effectiveness of content clusters, and where you can gather these metrics
- How Google’s recent content update impacts content clusters
- What to do if you already have a blog packed with content
- Marion’s top content cluster tip
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About Marion Leadbetter
Her passion is helping entrepreneurs and small businesses learn SEO to help them grow their business,
She loves to travel with her husband and kids, read and navigate life with teenagers!
Fun fact: Marion’s family is currently outnumbered 2-1 by pets in their house. She has an old staffy cross, a really angry budgie, 4 rats and 2 Dwarf hamsters.
Connect with Marion Leadbetter
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Transcript
Kate Toon:
Have you heard about content clusters? They’re all about strategic internal linking, creating little groups of content around a key topic. You create a pillar page and link to and from it, offering multiple internal links to keep readers entertained, educated and on your site. Benefits include more organised content, less overlap, and more authority on a given topic and increased content production speed. Sounds good, right? But where do you start? And if your existing content is currently the blog equivalent of a hoarder’s boudoir, how on earth do you organise all that old content into clusters? Well, today we have the answer to these questions and many more. Hello, my name is Kate Toon and I’m the head chef at the Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today I’m talking to Marion Leadbetter. Hi Marion, how are you?
Marion Leadbetter:
Hey, Kate. I’m good, how are you?
Kate Toon:
I’m very good. It’s very early in the morning for Marion, but she’s here, she’s ready to go. So let me tell you a little bit about her. Marion Leadbetter is an SEO strategist and founder of The SEO Upcycler. A mom of two teens, I feel that teenage stuff at the moment and a fiercely patriotic Scot, I love it, who can often be found upcycling old furniture. Her passion is helping entrepreneurs and small businesses learn SEO to help them grow their businesses. She loves to travel with her husband and kids, read and navigate life with teens. Fun fact, Marion’s family is currently outnumbered two to one by pets in their house. She has an old staffy cross, a really angry budgie, four rats and two dwarf hamsters. Ah, Marion the hamsters, I’m obsessed with that. You know you can’t get hamsters in Australia?
Marion Leadbetter:
You can’t, really?
Kate Toon:
No.
Marion Leadbetter:
Well, I did not know that. I think to be fair, they’re cute, but oh my god, they go all night long on that little wheel. They are louder than babies, honestly.
Kate Toon:
They are very loud. I had lots of hamsters as a kid, well, all the way through. My family’s obsessed with hamsters, right?
Marion Leadbetter:
Really? Wow.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, massively. My mom is mad about them, she’s already got the name for the next hamster, you know what I mean? But we once got one hamster and it arrived and it was really fat and it was pregnant and it had eight baby hamsters.
Marion Leadbetter:
Oh, my God. Oh, wow.
Kate Toon:
It was the best thing ever. We called it Mommy Ham.
Marion Leadbetter:
That is a brilliant name.
Kate Toon:
It is, yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
Actually, they are cute.
Kate Toon:
Well, yeah, they are. They’re lovely little beasts. But yeah, they’re not allowed in Australia, because Australia is commonly overrun. People like to introduce-
Marion Leadbetter:
Wow.
Kate Toon:
They introduce rabbits and that killed everything and then they introduce cane toads to kill something else. But then the cane toads killed everything else. So yeah, you know the British and their killing of things, being Scottish you know that very well.
Kate Toon:
Let’s not get into that. Today we’re not talking about patriotic Scots.
Marion Leadbetter:
No.
Kate Toon:
We are instead talking passionately about content clusters. So I tried to give a little brief introduction in the intro there, but can you explain to us the basics of what is a content cluster?
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, actually it’s a great job, it’s essentially, an SEO strategy that you can take your knowledge and your expertise and make it really work for you, in terms of the search engines. You can break up all the information that your business has into little subtopics and turn it into a content resource on your website. It’s to make sure that when people are coming to your site, they can easily navigate all the areas that you’re a real, real knowledgeable person on. You make it easy for them to bounce from one content to the other, to the other, to the other, because you’ve grouped them all together. And each piece of content should add to the person’s knowledge. It should be adding on to those knowledge gaps that they have. You should be filling them in. The whole point of content clusters, is instead of just putting content in your website whenever you can, wherever you can without any real focus or plan, you instead create these contents based on a similar topic.
Marion Leadbetter:
And you say, “I’m an authority in this. I’m going to give you all the information in this. I’m going to make it easy for, not just you the customer, but Google as well. To say, okay, well this is one piece and it leads to the next piece and it leads to the next piece.” And essentially, all those pieces should support your main pillar page and should support your service page. So eventually what you’re doing is not just giving people a whole load of knowledge, you are encouraging them to become customers. You’re leading them towards buying from you essentially, one way or another. Now I always say as well, it doesn’t mean you have to lead straight to a sales page. You could be building your email list, you could be selling your courses, you could be selling a service or you could be selling a product. As long as you’ve organised your content clusters correctly, they should do the work for you-
Kate Toon:
Yeah, yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
And help grow your business and show you as an authority in your own niche.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I mean the statistic that’s thrown around, is there’s something like six or 7 million blog posts posted every day.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And a lot of people are just flopping out blog content based on no real strategy, because they want to feed the Google beast, even though we know that Google doesn’t really care about regularity.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
So I like this, so there’s other ways of referring to it, some people refer to it as cornerstone content as well.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
If you wanted to be known for maybe, I don’t know, I guess the number of pillars depends on how detailed your business is, but if you wanted to be known for seven or eight core things, core topics, you wanted to be really known as an expert, they become your pillars.
Marion Leadbetter:
Absolutely.
Kate Toon:
Big deep articles about that pillar.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And then multiple articles that interlink.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
You talked about-
Marion Leadbetter:
You always support the big ones.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, a little… We had a guy on the podcast last week called James and he was talking about birds nests, they all support each other-
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, exactly.
Kate Toon:
With little sticks, I love that. So you talked about some of the benefits there. One of them is that you’ve got a bit of a strategy and you’re not just flopping content out into the world.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
What are some of the other benefits of using this cluster idea?
Marion Leadbetter:
Obviously, you’re coming at it from more the point of view of SEO. It’s going to boost you in terms of increasing your impressions. The more authority you show Google that you have, the more you show that you are an expert in your niche, the better chance you’ve got of ranking for more things, so getting your website in front of more people. But I always say as well, remember your website isn’t for Google, your content isn’t necessarily for Google. That is for your ideal customer and at some point your customer and Google’s customer overlap when they type in that search. But the benefit of this for your business should be hey, that you build your reputation as an authority in your niche. You make it easy for people to get information from your site.
Marion Leadbetter:
And when you do both of those things, you don’t just increase. Yes, your rankings will increase, yes your clicks rate will increase, traffic to your site will increase. But you should therefore be increasing your brand awareness in your niche. You should be increasing your email list. Your inquiries should be going up, your sales should be going up. You should be seeing a benefit to the bottom line of your business, because you have honed in on a customer’s need and you have structured your website in a way that it’s been easy for your customer to get the answers they need. And that makes them feel better towards your business and it makes them feel more inclined to take the next step in the buying process and become a customer.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that. So obviously, we talk about content feeding, informational intense, but obviously at the end of the day, all content online leading on a business site is generally leading towards a sale, it’s just that little bit further away.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And as you said, people, if you help someone with a problem then you engender a relationship and trust and who do we buy from?
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
We buy from people we trust.
Marion Leadbetter:
Exactly.
Kate Toon:
So it all works beautifully. So if I’m sitting here now thinking, “Well, this sounds good, I’ve just been randomly posting crap for the past year. I want to do this cluster thing. I want to create these pillar pieces of content.” How do I identify what my pillars should be, what my topics should be?
Marion Leadbetter:
I always get clients, so whether we are doing them for them, or a lot of time when I’m doing training through Upcycle, I get my client to grab a notepad or open a notes document and write down every little bit of your business that you cover. And that doesn’t matter whether you are a service provider or you have a shop, you will have subareas in business. So for example, yesterday I actually did this with a photography client. She is local to me and offers maternity shoots, mother and baby shoots. She offers wedding photography and she offers pet photography. So that’s where she started and I was like, “Right, okay, for each of those content clusters, those subtopics, what are you getting asked about most?” So get everybody to write down notes, it’s a brain dump essentially, under each topic first and foremost.
Marion Leadbetter:
Then you grab a spreadsheet and you put every piece of content on your site and what the topic is for that content. Does it meet any of those pillars? Because that’s the first thing I will get people to do. See if it doesn’t, see if it’s not relevant, see if it’s garbage, see if it’s briefly touching or if you’ve taken five blog posts to write something that could have been done in one. The first thing I actually tell people to do, is to have a cull of their site. So if you’ve got existing content and it’s irrelevant, if it’s weak, if it’s been chucked up in a hope and pray that something hits the wall and sticks, if we can’t use it, just get rid of it. If it doesn’t match the little notes that you’ve made, all those areas where you want to help people, then there’s no point having it on your site.
Marion Leadbetter:
Once we’ve done that and we’ve got rid of all the junk, we then say, “Okay, so you’re a maternity photographer. What blog posts have you got on your site that are maybe related to the questions moms to be will ask you? Age? How far into pregnancy should I be when I do this photo shoot? What should I wear? Frequently asked questions. And then we’ll work out, okay, how many pieces realistically of content can we create for your site? Now I’ll be really honest, theres times where I did this with local businesses, where you couldn’t create enough content that wouldn’t overlap each other to make a content cluster system work, so it isn’t for everyone. But when you have, like yesterday, we were able to whittle it down and work out, okay, well yeah, you already have two good blog posts on your site there and we worked out another three she could add for this category, maybe another two for this category. But it’s starting with a blank notepad.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that.
Marion Leadbetter:
-your own information of your business and saying, “Okay, well, what do I actually do? Yes, I take pictures but who do I take them of? Who am I serving? How do I break it down? What’s the difference…” So it’s almost seeing different income streams within your own business, what’s the different subtopics and sub-niches within it?
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
And as I said, that works with your services. I did it with a Christmas client who has a Christmas shop. We broke all of that down.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, yeah. I’ll just break that down a little bit. So going back to the pillars, I like the way that with the service based business, you identified core services.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And they then worked as potential clusters. And again, with an eCommerce store you could look at core categories you have within your store.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Do you sell soap? Do you sell clothing? Do you sell handbags? They could become clusters.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And then I can imagine the way that I do it with my clients, it’s like a little mind map and you write pets-
Marion Leadbetter:
I love mind maps.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love me a mind map.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
You write pets and it’s all the questions and there’s great tools, like answer the public that will tell you commonly asked questions.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And you can also type a question in and Google will serve you more and more questions.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
So I really like that approach. But also, you’ve covered a question, I was going to come to you later, but I love it. The content order is key, because most of us aren’t starting with a blank site, we already have content.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And I take, what I call it, I call it the shag, marry, kill approach.
Marion Leadbetter:
Cute.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So what content do we want to completely delete and redirect? What content do we want to combine, because it’s really thin?
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And we’ve spread too little butter over too much bread. And then what content do we want to… So we’re going to kill, combine, update and then we’ll see what the gaps are.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, that’s right.
Kate Toon:
And that’s fantastic. And I liked your honesty as well, because it doesn’t work for all types of clients or sometimes the clusters are just really small.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And maybe there’s three topics you can make in that cluster, so it’s not going to work. So you have to think about that upfront, do that planning work.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kate Toon:
And this is what people don’t do, isn’t it Marion? Because often as copywriters and SEOs we don’t get to do that part. Instead we’re just told, “Can you write 27 articles about teeth?” And you’re like-
Marion Leadbetter:
Okay.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, yeah. And it’s like, “Why are we doing this?”
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
“Oh, it’s because we want a rank for the word teeth, teeth Sydney.”
Marion Leadbetter:
I know. And you’re like, “But how is that going help your business?”
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, I know, it is. To be perfectly honest, it is. We also get clients to do, before we start any strategy and content clusters, is what are your SEO goals? What are you hoping to achieve at the end of this strategy? And see the amount of people that say, “Well, my competitor is at page one for the search term so I want get to page one.” And you’re just like…
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned some of-
Marion Leadbetter:
For vanity.
Kate Toon:
The of the other metrics there. I mean, really at the end of the day, it’s about your bottom line, it’s about making money. But often it’s not so much… I mean, obviously ranking’s important, but we’re also looking at engagement factors. How long people are spending on your site? Are they reading the whole post? Are they going from post, to post, to post? Are they sharing the content?
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, there.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, sharing it, linking to it, commenting on it. Those are all valuable metrics as well, that will lead to a sale. So this is a question I didn’t have in the list, but I want to ask you it. So we’re thinking about this pillar article, which might be 101 things you want to know about shooting your pets, I mean photographing your pets, don’t shoot your pets. And then we’re going to have maybe some sub articles which are answering questions, like what to do if your pet won’t sit still. What to bring to shoot.
Marion Leadbetter:
Exactly.
Kate Toon:
How long are we talking about in terms of word count for these pillar articles and the cluster articles?
Marion Leadbetter:
It’s really industry to the industry, depending on what your topic is. But I think pillar articles needs to be, for me, the success I’ve always found, have to be above 2000 words-
Kate Toon:
I agree.
Marion Leadbetter:
For your pillar article to really, really get anywhere, otherwise, it’s not really a piece of pillar content. The support articles vary, but I don’t like to see them under a thousand words either, because otherwise I think you end up with a few blogs, maybe 500 words here and another one 600 and you could have pulled them together and made one blog or post. And they’re not going to benefit you the same way that it would’ve done if you just said, “Okay, I’ll have less in my cluster but I’ll make sure that each piece is filled with really good…” Because you’re not wanting to just answer the first question, you’re not just wanting to answer that first keyword question, you’re wanting to answer some of the…
Marion Leadbetter:
People also ask questions in there, otherwise you’re not giving depth to the article and you’re not really providing the support to your customer or to the content clusters. Each piece has to have a really… Obviously, it’s like foundations, you’re supporting articles are almost like the foundations of the house and then you’re building on it. If those ones at the bottom of that list are rubbish, you’re not really going to get anywhere as you go up the way.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
So that’s my baseline when I’m telling people to… I’m blogging, I like to write loads of words, so that’s always my baseline. I have people come to me and say, “Hey I’ve written these content clusters.” And you look, God, that’s three and half paragraphs, that’s not-
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
Anything that’s going to bring you any good. And which really brings in the second thing about content clusters, you have to be really honest, if you are not somebody who can write those yourself, but you want this as a strategy, you’re going to have to outsource to someone who can.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I mean we’ve been talking obviously recently, Google announced their helpful content update. And the goal of each piece of content is that when someone gets to the end of your article, they really do have all their questions answered. They don’t have to go back.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Don’t send me back to the internet to try and find more and more and more content. Try to make the article whole and holistic and cover enough.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And if that article doesn’t answer everything, lead them to another article that will answer the next question and the next one.
Marion Leadbetter:
And the next one.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I agree.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And there’s lots of studies, actual studies and factual studies that say these longer contents do seem to rank higher, get more links, get more engagement, get more shares.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
So it’s not just something that we say to make more money out of you.
Marion Leadbetter:
No.
Kate Toon:
It’s a… Dear, client.
Marion Leadbetter:
I mean, I know Google will say there’s no ideal length.
Kate Toon:
No.
Marion Leadbetter:
And that’s not… And then you go, yeah, until you do a search and you realise that everything that is actually on page one is of a certain length.
Kate Toon:
Exactly.
Marion Leadbetter:
That’s what I always say to people, “Take your key word and search it.” Before you create any content for your clusters, you have to look at what’s already ranking for your keywords and make sure you can be better than what’s there. Because otherwise, why would Google bother putting you up there?
Kate Toon:
Yeah. We’ve talked about some positives here and obviously you work with a lot of different clients. When someone’s taking this strategy, what are some of the common mistakes you see people making? You maybe talked about industries that can’t really do this strategy. Are there industries that attempt this strategy and mess it up? And if so, how?
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, very much so. In terms of it all comes down to what we were talking about there and it’s the depths of the content. So we had a client once who had started it and came to us when she was halfway through, because she couldn’t get it to work, she was lost with it. And what she had done was, she’d started, she really had, she got her niches sorted and she had gone on to Google and she’d got people always ask questions. But then her content, she’d written one blog post and then she was putting it through spinners and just slightly changing the content, because she was like, “Well, I’m just repurposing. I keep hearing about repurposing content, so I’m just repurposing this blog post three or four different ways to suit that niche.” And you’re just like…
Marion Leadbetter:
Or my other big fail is they don’t internally link correctly. These cluster are dependent on having really strong internal links going to the right places. So when you take away the ones that don’t work, maybe in terms of content length or other information or they’ve not added anything personal enough to it. They’ve thought, “Okay, this is my topic.” They’ve gone on to Google, they’ve read other peoples at work and they’ve just rehashed it for themselves. And I’ll say, “Okay, but where’s your experience on the page?” And they go, “Ah, well, I was worried my experience wouldn’t be enough.” Or, “I didn’t know how you put my…” And you’re just like, “No, you’re what’s unique to your business, you’re what’s unique to your content cluster. So you have to add your own experience to it.” So that’s one step that actually happens more often than you think. The light content or the rehashing of content is another one.
Kate Toon:
I think that plays into my next question, which is about this Google friendly content update. Some of the core things that are mentioned are, you really have to have some skin in the game.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Either you have to be professor of whatever, at something university, so you have that EAT, that expertise, authority and trust there and you have that digital footprint of being a topic expert.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And if you’re not a topic expert, at least you have to put in, as you said, your experience. You’re writing about the 10 best pizza restaurants in Glasgow, don’t just go and cull them from TripAdvisor.
Marion Leadbetter:
Exactly.
Kate Toon:
Go in and say, “When I walked in with my dad, who loves a margherita, the smell of the mozzarella hit us in the nose and we loved the little…” You want to be making it clear that this is a lived experience.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
Exactly. And one of the other ways, a great way of doing it, is see if it’s something that you’ve experienced and you’re talking about it, see if you get a picture to match it. If you have a photo of you there, if you have whatever, video testimonial from a client that you can add in or something that says, “Hey, I’m not just pulling this out of my ass, I actually know what I’m talking about.” Because otherwise you’re a bit hit and miss. We had a client come to us who was a year from now, actually training just now, “And a year from now, I am also going to be able to do SFX makeup.” She was a makeup artist. And she was like, “So I’ve written these blog posts about being an SFX makeup artist.” And I was like, “That’s great, where is the volunteer experience? Where did you…” “Oh no, I’ve never done it, but they don’t need to know that.” And I was just like, “No.”
Kate Toon:
Oh, yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
That comes through and that’s not the right way. We’re not trying to scam people with this content. At the end of the day, people need to take their eyes off of Google sometimes and focus on the fact that who they’re actually writing for is a person that they want to build a relationship with.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
So starting off on the wrong foot isn’t really where you want to go.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. As you said, thinking about your goals and your intention is so important. And also, you mentioned there trying to make the content a little richer. You and me, I’m sure one of the things I loathe most is when I go onto a site and there’s a blog and it’s just one lump of copy with no headline, nothing, it’s just a lump. So trying as you said, to incorporate photography and video, quotes. I love a good statistic with some kind of…
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
But not just a statistic boldly plopped into the page, a bit of insight of what that statistic means.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah. Exactly.
Kate Toon:
And infographics and illustrations. And I love a giffy, I love my little giffy.
Marion Leadbetter:
I will always say as well, don’t forget the simple stuff. See the amount of people that give me blog content and there isn’t an H2 or head. Or there’s text paragraphs that are 10 paragraphs long and you’re just like… The actual way your content is written is just as important as what you’ve written, because people are busy. We scan articles even when we’re taking in a lot of them, you’ll get hit with… I mean, I use my daughter as an example, sometimes Katie is sitting her Nat 5’s last year, which is the equivalent of GCSEs and a lot of the sites we were studying on, Katie wants be costume designer. So she did drama last year, she’s doing it again this year. See the sheer amount of sites we found online, where she was trying to learn information and it was literally just wall to wall text, not a space between them, not header broken up. Hard enough for anyone to read, but Katie’s dyslexic, so for her she just bounces off of those sites, they’re just no use.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
And you’re just thinking, that’s the benefit of smaller paragraphs, of making things easy to read, of letting people’s eyes scan to a subheader, should be another question. It should bring another relevant fact that you can easily guide people through your content. So it’s not just about having the content clusters that help, it’s the actual quality of how the content within each cluster is written.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
It’s just as important.
Kate Toon:
That usability piece-
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Breaking up content, white space, subheaders, giving the eye time to breathe. I like to talk about the wiggle as well. Not just every paragraph, a big chunky paragraph, little short connecting sentences and as you said, sign posting the content, because the goal is not necessarily for everyone to read every single word. The goal is for someone to get what they need from that article.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And that may be just one paragraph, but that could still leave them satisfied and able to take the next step. So I think usability’s important, you’ve talked there a little bit about accessibility, remembering that not everybody who comes to your site has perfect reading ability.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
They may not have English as a first language. So readability, keeping that readability level, not to graduate level, but in Australia we would say about year seven, which is about 13, 14 years old.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Because people just don’t read in the same way online.
Marion Leadbetter:
I know.
Kate Toon:
I’m reading it at the supermarket checkout while trying to pay for something and I’ve got a podcast playing in my ear. I’m not reading with the same level of attention as I would a book in a quiet room.
Marion Leadbetter:
Exactly.
Kate Toon:
We need to be aware of that.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah. I mean, accessibility is really important. I’m in the process, we’ve already done it for a couple of clients and I’m actually in the process of doing it for my own site, whereas we are adding audio recordings, just readings of each blog post to the bottom of them. Because the more valuable you can make these clusters, the more you offer to everyone, the better your site is going to do overall. And like you and I both know it is not a quick one. You’re chopping up your content clusters and all of a sudden you’re acing Google within three months. You’re going to have to have the patience for it to take time and sometimes they perform in ways you don’t expect them to. So you need to just have a bit of patience and be willing to really put the work in for these to work. This isn’t about scamming Google or doing anything else, this is about turning your website into an incredible resource for your potential client. And that’s why it’s worth taking the time and adding depth to content clusters.
Kate Toon:
Mike drop. I love that. That might be the quote of the episode. Yeah, I agree and I think on the flip of that, we do a transcript for every episode of the podcast.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
They’re going to love this one with your accent, I tell you.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, good luck with that, it does not work. It’s like there’s a skit here where you get into a lift and the other two guys are trying to say 11 to the lift to make it move and no, it does not happen. It’s just…
Kate Toon:
I know, 11, 11.
Marion Leadbetter:
11.
Kate Toon:
So yes, thinking about accessibility, thinking about usability and also thinking about repurposing. You mentioned there you’re adding audio. Obviously, the thing I love about this strategy is once you’ve got your pillar and you’ve got your clusters, some of those clusters are going to really lend themselves well to social media.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
You’re going to be able to chop that blog up into 20 social media posts, maybe make a little YouTube video, maybe make a reel, a little infographic, a meme, a quote graphic. And then what’s happening is your social media is deeply integrated and connected with your blog strategy.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And it’s holistic rather than just, you’re whacking up crap on Instagram-
Marion Leadbetter:
Hoping it works.
Kate Toon:
That’s got nothing to do with what you’re putting on your site.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And it’s all just a bit of a mishmash.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
This way it flows down from the pillar, I’m doing hands people, you can’t see it, but Marion can and she’s loving it. It flows from the pillar to the cluster, to the waterfall down to your social media.
Marion Leadbetter:
Exactly. And I always think as well you can use it for… People get daunted sometimes when you sit and you say, “Well, you’re going to create this really big authority pillar and another one and another one.” And they’re like, “Oh I can’t write all this content.” But you’re like, “No, break it down then.” And see once you’ve done that, there’s your social media post, there’s your newsletter.
Kate Toon:
For a whole month, a whole month of social media.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, exactly.
Kate Toon:
You just saved yourself so much time.
Marion Leadbetter:
People should be able to tell what you are about, going from one of your platforms to another. So they should be able to go from your website-
Kate Toon:
Yes.
Marion Leadbetter:
To your social media feed to read your news letter. And there is a continuity of tone, there is a continuity of voice in your message, it’s the same throughout. And one of the best ways to start it, is by making sure your site is just jampacked, that it screams, “Hey, I am knowledgeable, I know what I’m talking about.”
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it’s that consistency, not necessarily in frequency and regularity of putting the content out there, but that consistency of voice. So you are who you are, whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, your site, or when someone picks up the phone, it’s just one message. And as you said, even if you think of it in a basic way, you’re going to try and do 12 pillar posts in a year, let’s say for example. There’s 12 newsletters and there’s 12… And the thing is as well, we’re generally here talking about evergreen content. So you’re not producing something you are then going to have to trash in 12 months, because it’s out of date. Maybe you’ll need to make some updates, check the stats, make sure the links are still working, but this is content that lasts a lifetime really.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah. And keeps –
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And as you mentioned, time, so I have a blog post I wrote right when I started my business, well, not right when, but about 2009 I think, and it was, How Much Do Copywriters Charge? And I’ve revisited it a few times and added those additional questions, people also asked, integrated them, added some infographics and some videos.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And still, even though that site is now defunct, it still delivers two, three, 4,000 visitors a month.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
2009.
Marion Leadbetter:
Seriously?
Kate Toon:
That was worth writing.
Marion Leadbetter:
Isn’t it? It’s always worth the pay off if you can just have patience. You just need to have that little… Especially with a content strategy, you need to be patient, because well, you just have to, that’s the rules.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
Every so often you’ll put something up and then by some miracle, it hits sooner. But the pay off lasts a lot longer than you had to wait for it to get somewhere, as long as you’re doing it right.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I had Rand Fishkin on the pod a while ago and he was talking about how everyone’s dream is that they go viral. But they’d gone viral with something in particular and it’d actually been a bit of a nightmare, because it wasn’t the right thing to go viral, it was a bit of a…
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And really it’s not the one post that goes viral for one day, it’s not the one hit wonder, it’s the slow slog of turning up and helping day after day, after day that really, really pays off.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
And I think some people are just a little bit impatient when it comes to SEO.
Marion Leadbetter:
They are, God they are.
Kate Toon:
They’re used to the quick results.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah, we’re fed social media results and I keep saying, but they burn out fast.
Kate Toon:
Yes.
Marion Leadbetter:
So see long after your social media post is done and dusted and people have forgotten all about it, yes, yours is still working for you.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it’s the half life analogy I love.
Marion Leadbetter:
It is. I used to be a pharmaceutical rep and I often use that analogy as well, half life.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, the idea of being that a tweet has a half life of seven minutes or something like that.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
It’s gone before you’ve even seen it. So look, Marion, I think we’ve explained this pretty well, you’ve explained the benefits, hopefully people will be willing to put that effort in. And we can see big brands, big people like Brian Dean and whatever, he only has about 10 or so posts on his site, but they’re so quality that he can use those again, again and just keep coming back to them again, again. And he’s made himself therefore, an authority on those topics.
Marion Leadbetter:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
So it might seem daunting for a smaller business and it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight, but if you start with a strategy by the end of the year you could have 12 pillar posts and lots of little clusters, then you just keep on building.
Marion Leadbetter:
You will.
Kate Toon:
So if we’ve got a little small business listening together today, maybe a photographer, maybe somebody else, what would be your final tip, your top tip to leave them with at the end of the episode?
Marion Leadbetter:
Write for your customer, not a search engine. That is my number one tip always. Whenever I have an SEO client, Google aren’t going to pay you money, they’re not going to buy your services. So there’s no point in getting to page one, if you get onto that content cluster, you’ve only written to get to page one. But it doesn’t make any difference to your client’s life, it doesn’t answer the questions to really make sure that you are writing to help your potential clients become actual clients.
Kate Toon:
I love that.
Marion Leadbetter:
That would be my number one tip.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that. And it’s often said, but I think what we’re talking about here, is you might write some keyword stuffed, clever article that tricks Google into ranking you number one. But then if I as a reader click through and I can’t read it, I don’t understand it, I’m not engaged, it was for nought, your SEO agency can report back that, wow, they got you a number one ranking for this piece of content, but you’ll look at it and go and it did nothing for my business.
Marion Leadbetter:
Nothing.
Kate Toon:
Yes. And that’s-
Marion Leadbetter:
Your emails didn’t grow. Nothing.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, nothing. No more money, show me the money.
Marion Leadbetter:
Nope.
Kate Toon:
Thank you so much, Marion, for coming on the podcast.
Marion Leadbetter:
No problem at all.
Kate Toon:
If people want to find out a little bit more about you, obviously I’m going to include links to all your bits and bobs in the show notes. But where can people find out more about you?
Marion Leadbetter:
They can find out over at www.seoupcycler.com.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. You’re also on-
Marion Leadbetter:
That’s where I will tend to hang out.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Marion Leadbetter:
On social media, Instagram and the usual.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So you’ll also find out at the SEO Upcycler on Instagram and we’ve included links to Pinterest and LinkedIn as well. So if this all sounds a bit much and you’re looking for someone to help do it for you and help you with that strategy, then obviously Marion is the woman to call. Well, thank you very much, Marion. I’ll let you go off to do the school run.
Marion Leadbetter:
Thank you very much.
Kate Toon:
Have a lovely day.
Marion Leadbetter:
I know, that’s it. Thank you so much. Take care.
Kate Toon:
Thanks. So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about content pillars, clusters, or waterfalls, then head to my I Love SEO group on Facebook. Now, as you know, I like to end the show with a shout out to one of my lovely listeners and today’s is SFL from Australia and they write, “That was perfectly simple and just what I needed.” Thank you. I’m not sure which episode they were referring to, but I’m very grateful nonetheless. If you like the show, please don’t forget to leave a five star rating and review wherever you listened and you’ll get a shout out on the show.
Kate Toon:
Now, don’t forget, you can get show notes for this episode at the www.therecipeforseosuccess.com. If you found our accents, my little Northern accent and Marion’s Scottish accent, a little bit difficult to understand, we have included show notes, so you can go and check them out. And also make sure that you have a listen out to my other show, Clever Copy Chats. It’s growing in popularity, some great experts there. Whether you’re a copywriter, you write copy in your business or you’re just a small business owner, I think you’ll get something out of that. So Clever Copy Chats, give it a Google. And until next time, happy SEOing.
