No wonder SEO is one of the ever-changing marketing strategies. Every year Google brings in dozens of updates and force digital marketers to come up with new ways to keep up. 

Even just keeping up is not enough. To ensure the search engine ranking doesn’t get hurt, marketers need to stay up to date. What shall the marketers do today to make sure their websites adapt to the search engine updates five years later, is a big question.

Now, I am not predicting the future of Google trends. However, below are some of emerging strategies digital marketers need to keep in mind. Reach out Orange County SEO service providers if you want to stay ahead of the game. 

Topic clusters to ensure thoughtful and structured internal linking 

Marketers must use topic clusters to ensure thoughtful and structured internal linking. While internal linking defines the structure and hierarchy of your website, they also make the navigation easier by carefully distributing link authority throughout your web pages. You will be unable to reap the full benefits of internal linking if its structure is not organized. 

Use the topic clustering to craft an effective internal linking strategy. It will help readers as well as search crawlers to understand your site easily. Simply put, topic clustering is a group of your web pages by specific topic. In other words, it is a combined and organized version of the blog category and the manually curated pages. 

Topic clusters allow users to find an answer to their queries quickly and easily.

Following tips will help you build a value-driven cluster internal linking on your website. 

1. Identify your topics

Brainstorm around which main topics you are going to cover on your website. Create comprehensive pages about each category your site is going to cover. A content audit is not an easy task, but it’s critical for the long term health of your website. If you already have a lot of content on your website, this task may not be that much fun. However, it will be somehow easier if you are looking forward to creating fresh content for your newly built website. Assuming if your existing content has already tags in place, it will be pretty easier for you to categorize them. 

If your content is not already categorized on your website, make a simple spreadsheet to create the overall structure of your content. On the spreadsheet, insert all the links to the blog posts in rows corresponding to the main topic. Then identify the pages that can serve as a pillar page for rest of the posts. 

2. Build a cluster and interlink them together

Once you categorize and organize your blog posts, it should be pretty easier for you to group them into clusters. 

To link, an article to its pillar page use breadcrumbs. Check out Google’s best practices to learn how you can use breadcrumbs for structured data.

Link all pages with one another using the in-content links. In-content links are favorable for two main reasons. First, they are considered to be more effective and allows link equity around the website, and secondly, they improve the click-through rates. 

Where necessary, you can add links to the content which are not in the cluster, but this should not be done too often. The main objective of this strategy is to provide value to the visitors through their customer journey and answer their specific questions while minimizing the conversion barriers. 

3. An ongoing strategy to promote your clusters

It is always a great idea to revamp the content category to turn them into a cluster. The end goal of revamping your content is to create high-value content to the end user. 

You can also create multi-media resource pages that will categorize your existing content by topic.  After all, all this content is your biggest asset. Create a strategy to market these pages, which will ultimately drive traffic to the individual articles that are already linked to the main pages of your website. 

So here is what you can do, add your SEO team to your existing social media calendar so that they will be able to promote these pages via social media as soon as you are done working on them. 

Leverage user intent for SEO

Lately, user intent for SEO has received a lot of attention. Google is currently focusing on measuring and identifying user satisfaction levels, and the future of Google seems pretty similar. Orange County SEO service providers can help you stay up to date regarding Google trends. 

User intent refers to the process in which a user sends a query and then finds the relevant information and then either re-enters the next query or stops searching. 

The objective of the user-intent SEO is helping the end user have a great level of satisfaction which improves the ranking of your website. It also improves the visitor retention rate by providing them what they exactly want.

You can incorporate a different level of funnel around the search intent while creating content. The queries can be divided into transactional, information, and navigational. 

Focus on topic optimization instead of keyword optimization 

Whereas the intent of keyword optimization is to rank a page for a specific keyword, the goal of the topic optimization is to rank the page for a particular group of keywords which you already have identified. They may be the main keywords, or the related keywords and their synonyms. 

Think about achieving wider goals and be strategic about the future of Google. Use topic clusters that are organized and links that are structured. Today, structured links and topic clusters are essential for SEO strategies than ever before. Reach out to your nearest Orange county SEO service providers to ensure the sustainable presence of your online business.