2) Use keyword clustering to discover new content opportunities

Another tactic for discovering what content to create, as well as new content opportunities, is through the SERP features and the prioritization of them.

Check for features and formatting such as featured snippets, video, images, knowledge panels and “people also ask” (PAA). PAA is especially useful; it’s a trove of questions, many of which can be answered within your content. Other questions may need a new article or page altogether, so you can start building out your content architecture and forming your internal linking strategy.

Additionally, by integrating these features, you’ll be covering more on your chosen topics, thereby increasing keyword density and closing the gap on your competitors. Plus, your content will use the language of your audience as opposed to your assumed keywords.

Keyword clustering is powerful. The graph below shows one article’s journey in Google SERPs. It ranks for 50 clustered keywords and includes questions from PAA. This article quickly achieved a featured snippet, image rankings, 9.37k clicks, 68.9k impressions, 13.6% CTR and an average of six minutes spent on the page. Oh, and this was achieved before a single website back-linked directly to the article.

Snippet taken from Fortune and Frame’s Google Search Console showing an article’s journey in the SERPs from publication. This particular article is about messages to write in a book (see point #3 to understand what I did with this link here).

3) Choose the most appropriate keyword for the content (then use internal linking, naturally)

Keyword clustering presents you with opportunities you may have otherwise overlooked. If you pull together multiple keywords that all sit within one article or web page, you can determine the best angle to write in order to suit your focus keyword and your online presence.

You will have a selection of keywords and you can use their search volume, competition and your website’s domain authority to determine the best keyword for your site to focus on right now.

Additionally, it means that you can write meaningful anchor text as part of your internal linking strategy. Taking the example from the graph above (“This particular article is about messages to write in a book gift…”), the anchor text “messages to write in a book gift” is not the focus keyword. The focus keyword is: “what to write in a book for a gift”, which doesn’t sound natural at all in the context above.

Thanks to a selection of clustered keywords, an internal link using relevant keywords, was easily slotted into a grammatically correct sentence. Ultimately, you can fit your keywords into your content instead of writing your content around your keywords.

4) Say goodbye to cannibalization

You could argue that you can avoid keyword cannibalization without clustering keywords, but can you?

If you know which keywords you’ve used where, then you should, in theory, have no (ok, there might be a little bit) keyword cannibalization. You won’t fall for the mistake of assigning a focus keyword to two content pieces – or more subtly – creating two content pieces for keywords that should’ve been clustered and covered within one article.

By clustering keywords and analyzing SERPs, you might be surprised at what belongs within the same content piece.

Let’s take these two keywords: “Rubik’s Cube method” (260 searches/month) and “How to complete a Rubik’s Cube” (590 searches/month).

Without looking at the SERPs, one might be tempted to assign “Rubik’s Cube method” as a focus keyword for an article that shares different methods, whereas “‘how to complete a Rubik’s Cube” would be a step-by-step guide. Thankfully, Google SERPs is quite clear that these two keywords can be used—and should be used—on the same web page to avoid cannibalization and poor performing articles because they simply don’t cover the topics in full.

5) Keyword clustering streamlines the SEO content plan and improves productivity

There’s no shying away from keyword clustering. Whilst it does add a whole lot of time to the keyword research process, it saves a lot of time long-term. The more keyword research and clusters you can create early on, the more it pays back in Google ranks and seamless marketing strategy.

The main benefit is objective planning for content. If you use keyword clustering to create a clear plan of action for SEO content for every single page on your website and jot down suitable content ideas for the future, you’ll be left with long-term scalability, since you have keywords to target over time that can be scaled indefinitely.

Your team can work from one document detailing which keywords live where, which content needs to be created in order to achieve a rank, and also, how that content can be repurposed for use across the marketing landscape.

Keyword clustering is a crucial and preparatory step

You can think of keyword clustering as the preparatory work that takes place before you execute SEO. An analogy, shared with me by Adriana Stein, is that keyword clustering is like the shopping and preparation of ingredients before cooking. If you skip this crucial step you might find yourself a bit flustered later on with a dinner that wasn’t quite what it could have been.

Ultimately, what keyword clustering does is insist that you take a step closer to your marketing strategy. Through SERP analysis, you will understand your customer on another level—you’ll know the Google SERPs for your desired keywords inside and out and exactly what you need to work towards in order to secure that page one rank.

Then, you’ll be rewarded with a full, scalable content plan, an entire team working in pursuit of the same content goals, and most importantly, seamlessly optimized content!