SEO and affiliation: the benefits of working with clusters

Various techniques exist to improve your SEO, including SEO clusters. Well-organized page clusters enable search engines to identify your content as a reference on specific subjects. Your pages then appear more frequently in search results, generating more visits and, consequently, more sales.

Understanding SEO clusters

The concept of an SEO cluster refers to a group of pages sharing the same theme. By interconnecting them through internal links, you create a mesh around a specific subject that improves the SEO of all the pages belonging to the cluster.

For your site's overall SEO, it's crucial to create clusters to distinguish yourself from other sites, and reinforce your position as an expert in a particular field.

In concrete terms, a cluster is made up of a main page, known as the "pillar", which links to various pages dealing with the same subject. These pages are all linked back to the main page. For example, topics such as home automation, connected light bulbs and surveillance cameras could be grouped together in a cluster on the connected home.

Here are a few examples:

• CNET's Black Friday 2023 hub features numerous articles on this topic.
• The VPN comparator at Phonandroid brings together various product tests on a single page.
• The Ouest-France promo code area brings together content-rich pages on a high PageRank domain.

Create clusters for affiliated articles

SEO clusters are highly relevant to affiliate marketing. By creating these groups of thematic pages, you attract qualified traffic to your site. Internal meshing benefits your articles and encourages further reading, leading to more clicks on your affiliate links, and therefore more sales.

There are three distinct stages in creating a cluster:

1. Semantic preparation: Use free tools such as answerthepublic to identify key themes. This site identifies the keywords associated with a query and provides an index of importance for each of them. The information gathered should enable you to sort the high-potential themes from the others. Once you've compiled a list of keywords related to your topic, you can move on to writing content.
2. Production: Copywriting must comply with the rules and best practices of content production, particularly with regard to text length, the number of keyword occurrences and strategic placement in various tags (meta tags, section titles, paragraphs, image captions, etc.).
3. To strengthen the cluster, it's crucial to link all pages together. Related articles can be linked by anchors in the text or below the articles, with, for example,"On the same topic" Continue Reading blocks listing related content.

Tools and resources for optimizing clusters

A number of useful SEO tools are available for cluster management.

As mentioned above, lexical preparation is essential. With Answerthepublic, you can compile a list of keywords. This tool enables you to check the potential of your cluster by gathering all the semantics and questions related to your theme, and their potential.

You can also prepare your cluster as follows:

1. Go to SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz and check out the keywords that seem interesting to you.
2. Identify the keywords with the highest traffic potential in the results.
3. Benchmark your competitors and analyze their sites.
4. Sort pages by organic traffic to highlight the best pages.
5. Make a note of the most interesting keywords.

Once your cluster has been launched, you can check its performance using the same tools. Over time, add content to reinforce the mesh and maximize its effectiveness.

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