How We Used Topical Clusters To Boost A Startup’s Visibility in a Competitive Niche (Within 12 Months)

The Story of NextEvo Naturals

NextEvo Naturals, capitalizing on their healthcare and R&D knowledge, advocates for CBD’s life-changing potential. They’ve engineered technology for enhanced CBD absorption, unlike conventional products. Their scientific and medical team tirelessly work towards elevating CBD and supplement standards.

NextEvo’s Challenge: Penetrating the Competitive CBD Market

Breaking into the bustling CBD market in the USA, NextEvo encountered several challenges. First, the market was brimming with authoritative and diverse brands, making it highly saturated. Second, as a startup e-commerce site, budget limitations were a reality.

Our task involved creating original, engaging, and informative content that not only complied with strict CBD regulations but also achieved high rankings on search engines on a limited budget.

Why NextEvo Chose Snippet Digital

NextEvo Naturals chose Snippet Digital as their SEO partner, valuing our expertise in keyword research, content development strategy, and content creation, particularly in challenging, competitive industries.

Recognizing the fierce competition in their niche, we aimed to build topical authority through the development of several interlinked topical clusters. This strategy would allow us to direct more internal links to product pages, thereby enhancing their ranking.

What are “topical clusters”?

Topical clusters are a method used in content marketing and SEO strategy where related content is organized around a central topic or hub. They are comprised of a central “pillar” content piece, usually a comprehensive guide on a broad topic, and several related but more specific pieces of “cluster” content (also known as “spokes”). The cluster content links back to the pillar content and to each other where relevant.

This structure helps search engines understand the semantic relationship between the pieces of content, which can improve the ranking of all the pages in the cluster. It’s also helpful for users as it allows them to dive deep into a topic and easily navigate between related content.

The real challenge is implementing this strategy on a large scale while adhering to a startup budget. Traditional processes like keyword research, topical clustering, and content creation are typically labour-intensive. However, our innovative, bespoke software enabled us to offer a cost-effective solution without compromising on quality.

How We Did It

Everything starts with keyword research…

We employ 3 main methods of collecting keywords:

• Traditional keyword research: we conduct traditional keyword research using SEO tools, including our proprietary Keyword Discovery tool, to identify relevant keywords based on search volume and competition level.
• “Zero volume” keyword research: we also explore “zero volume” keywords, representing 15-20% of daily Google searches that are unique and not previously searched. Traditional SEO tools lack this data, so we use our own techniques to find these keywords, offering a competitive advantage as other websites won’t be targeting these queries.
• Tangential keyword research: additionally, we delve into tangential keyword research, targeting keywords indirectly related to the product but closely tied to the target user’s interests.

Once the keyword research had been conducted, we needed an efficient way to group the keywords and plan the necessary pages taking into consideration their intent. NextEvo Naturals chose Snippet Digital partly due to our expertise in this area, enabled by our renowned software, Keyword Insights, which streamlines this process considerably.

After inputting our keyword research into our software, it rapidly produced a list of pages required for creation. The image below shows a sample of these “keyword clusters“. Each “card” in the screenshot represents a page that we needed to create on the NextEvo site, also displaying the targeted keywords for each page.

Keyword Insights uses sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) to cluster similar clusters together, thereby creating our topical clusters. In the image below, each yellow circle denotes the overarching topical cluster. The blue circles within each represent the individual pieces of related content we have to produce around that particular “topic” to affirm our authoritative status.

We made use of the auto-generated topic clusters from Keyword Insights to effortlessly construct a visual information architecture map using Lucid. The purpose of this approach was twofold. Firstly, it facilitated the client’s understanding of our plan. Secondly, it enabled us to plan the articles, inclusive of their internal linking structure, from the get-go.

It also paved the way for outlining the customer journey from these articles to the transactional pages. In essence, it allowed us to design the entire topical clusters from the start, strategizing how to guide users from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel. A zoomed-out image of part of this information architecture can be seen below.

Finally, we crafted a content calendar incorporating the hubs and spokes previously outlined in our information architecture. This approach guaranteed systematic and methodical content development. Moreover, it facilitated real-time collaboration with NextEvo Naturals, ensuring our content adhered to any guidelines they had set.

The Results

Over a 12-month period, we strategized, prepared content briefs, and ultimately crafted 29 pieces of content for NextEvo Naturals. This included 5 hub articles which were internally linked to 24 spoke pieces. Moreover, we revamped 22 existing content pieces to align with our topical clustering strategy, enabling us to interlink both the previously developed and new content.

As a result, overall daily website traffic quickly shot from 138 to 4613 visits per day (3242.75%) over a 12-month period in an extremely competitive niche.