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Travel Blog Topical Cluster Growth Case Study
Objective:
Grow a 5-year-old travel site’s organic traffic & authority by focusing on a single topical cluster.
Strategic Observation:
The website’s users increased from 5,560 monthly users to 16,671 monthly users in under six months.
Date:
April 2022 – November 2022
Sevices and Skills Used
Topic Mining
Topics were mined that allowed us to easily create content across all of the identified geographical locations. Only one topic was chosen but it was replicated for each geographical location identified. The topic was chosen based on low competition, lower traffic, and ease of completion.
Idea and Strategy
50 Geographical locations were identified where the site had existing authority based on results from auditing the site and brainstorming amongst the SEO strategists involved. The idea was to use this as an opportunity to try out a topical cluster approach despite SEO software identifying the keywords as “low volume”.
Internal Linking
To compound the effectiveness of the case study, internal links were added throughout the process. These internal links pointed to other related topics in the cluster, as well as to other related content on the site. This was to help Google get a better understanding of where this new content fits in on the site.
Editing and Checking
Once the posts were written, senior editors & project managers oversaw the uploading process. This ensured that the content was factually accurate and stayed within the scope of the content brief.
SEO Content Planning
Once the topic and geographical locations were identified, it was time to create a detailed SOP. Intern writers were going to be handling these topics, so to ensure consistency the SOP was fleshed out to create a detailed brief. A template was created that included all the headings, sub-headings, and focal areas. The word counts for every paragraph were mapped out so as to ensure that every word brought value to the readers. Fluff was to be avoided at all costs!
Campaign Results
100
%
Increase in Organic Traffic
The site’s organic traffic increased from 5,560 to 16,671 monthly users in under six months. Six months marks the date that the first post was published. The final post (#50) was only uploaded 4 months later.
66
%
Increase in Organic Keywords
The number of organic keywords ranking in Google SERPs increased from 9,883 to 23,466.
This was achieved in under six months.
0
%
Increase in Pages
The travel site was 5 years old and already had 500 blog posts. The topical cluster only added 10% of this amount (50 posts), but the site’s organic traffic tripled.
0
Features Snippets Stolen
Thanks to the detailed layout of the site, 40 featured snippets were stolen during the 6 months period. By month 4 we only had 13 featured snippets, but this grew to 40 by the end of month 6.
Valuable Insights
Topical clusters are a great way to build authority on a site. Instead of spending a lot of time and resources creating content on different topics, it can be more valuable to double down on a single topic.
This sends signals to Google that you are the expert on this topic. And unless there are multiple competitors doing the same thing, it is very possible to reach the top rankings on the SERPs. Not only will your topical cluster do well, but your entire site’s authority will increase. That’s why it’s important to choose your topic wisely – which is where SEO specialists come in.
Thorough travel marketing research and a well thought out SOP need to be created to keep the posts as uniform and effective as possible. Creating a batch of niche content is how a 5 year old site (with over 500 blog posts) was able to triple its organic traffic in less than 6 months.
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