My All-Time Favorite Tools for Executing a Topic Cluster Strategy
SEO tools are a marketers best friend.
In content marketing, when building, executing, and reporting on a topic cluster strategy, there are TONS of different tools you could use. This list is far from exhaustive, and each different SEO tool on the market has its own strengths and weaknesses.
I often get asked which tools I personally use when executing a topic cluster strategy, or which tools are best for helping to create a topic cluster strategy. While I can’t claim to be an expert on every tool out there, I certainly am happy to share the tools I do use and what I use them for!
Strategy Phase
There are a number of different tools I use in the strategy phase in order to help me build a topic cluster strategy initially. During this phase, you are doing keyword research, exploring which potential keywords you want to target across the topic cluster, from the high-level pillar keyword to the longer-tail subtopic blog keywords.
During this phase, I heavily use the following tools:
SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool
What it is for: Keyword research.
What is it: According to SEMRush, the Keyword Magic tool is built to help you “find new ranking opportunities in just a few clicks with a database of 21 billion keywords.”
When searching keyword data, you can learn more about how important factors about search behavior and results that will tell you more about the keyword:
Keyword Difficulty
Intent
Search Volume
Trend
Cost Per Click
SERP Features
How much is it: The Keyword Magic Tool is available to try for free on a trial basis and included with most paid packages SEMRush offers. As of this writing, monthly packages run between about $120 and $450 depending upon the full scope of features you want from your SEMRush subscription.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about this particular feature of the larger SEMRush offering here.
Why I love it: The Keyword Magic tool is great because it helps you to understand how searchers are looking for certain subjects. You can give the tool a seed keyword and it will return a ton of information about keywords that are similar or related, allowing you to truly dig in and see how people are phrasing their searches.
It also helps you to tie together ideas as you are topic clustering to manage an overarching keyword strategy that spans separate content clusters.
Often, the first guess you might have about how searchers would phrase their search isn’t the phrase that actually has the most volume behind it. For instance, I might have thought that “online fitness classes” were the best phrase, but upon using the keyword tool I might discover that “fitness classes online” is actually a more commonly used search term.
Especially if you are new to an industry, understanding related keywords is super helpful in learning more about the terminology and, let’s be honest, jargon that is prolific in the industry. Knowing how people in your industry talk is half the battle in building your content strategy.
SEMRush Domain Overview Tool
What it is for: Keyword research.
What is it: According to the SEMRush website, the Domain Overview tool is meant to help you get a complete analysis of an existing domain, including: “[getting] a full overview of a domain and its online visibility, [analyzing] a domain’s growth trend over time, and [discovering] the top keywords that bring the most traffic from the organic and paid channels.”
How much is it: The Domain Overview Tool is available to try for free on a trial basis and included with most paid packages SEMRush offers. As of this writing, monthly packages run between about $120 and $450 depending upon the full scope of features you want from your SEMRush subscription.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about this particular feature of the larger SEMRush offering here.
Why I love it: The Domain Overview tool is something I use heavily in the research phase of building a topic cluster strategy. You can run the tool for any website and see what terms that website is ranking well for.
I tend to use it as an idea generator. You can run your competitor websites through it to see what terms they are ranking for. Even better, industry websites are a treasure trove of data when run through the tool.
Say I was trying to reach an audience of Electrical Engineers. I might run the IEEE website through the domain overview tool to see what the industry website was ranking well for, giving me a good idea of the topics electrical engineers are discussing at an industry level.
Answer the Public
What it is for: Content planning.
What is it: Answer the Public is a tool that allows you to “get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of your customers.” You can put a search term into the tool and learn all the questions searchers ask about that particular term.
How much is it: Answer the Public is free under a certain number of searches per day.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about the tool, and give it a try, here.
Why I love it: Answer the Public is great for generating ideas for content, particularly once you’ve identified target keywords for your topic cluster. It is a great location to get ideas for article titles that can really answer the questions searchers have about a topic.
Google Trends
What it is for: Keyword research.
What is it: Google Trends is a tool that allows you to see interest in a search term over time.
How much is it: Google Trends is free.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about the tool, and give it a try, here.
Why I love it: I often use Google Trends to check on if the popularity of the term I’m using is going up or down over time, which helps me understand how my content cluster will perform over time.
In addition, I often use the tool to compare terms to see which version of a search term searchers are favoring. For instance, I might use it to check spellings or different abbreviations of a term to see which is gaining or losing popularity. An example I’ve recently used myself is comparing the difference in the searches for “adops” vs. “ad ops” to see if people preferred the space or tended to remove it when searching.
Execution Phase
Once your topic cluster strategy has been built, you’ll switch gears to execution. This means writing the content, optimizing it and publishing it. The most common tools I use during this phase are:
HubSpot SEO Tools
What it is for: Managing internal links.
What is it: According to HubSpot:
“Using HubSpot's SEO tools, you can research and organize topics and subtopic keywords based on your company's areas of expertise. These topics serve as the foundation for all the content you create on your blog and website. Creating content that's organized by topic and subtopic helps search engines understand what your website is about. In the long term, this strategy improves how your content performs in search results.”
How much is it: The SEO Tool is available as part of the HubSpot Marketing Hub suite of tools. I use this tool because I use HubSpot for marketing automation as a whole. Prices range significantly depending on what features of the tool you want to use.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about the tool here.
Why I love it: If you are a HubSpot user, building your content clusters out in the SEO tool has a ton of benefits. As you connect your pillar page and article or blog links into the tool, it will give you real-time feedback about if each of them links back to your central pillar, helping you catch any errors in your linking strategy.
You'll built out the cluster visually, with your pillar page at the center of the cluster and all your sub-topic blogs at the outside edges.
It will also help you in reporting on the performance of your topic cluster content, which we will cover here in the next section.
MarketMuse Optimization Tool
What it is for: Keyword optimization.
What is it: According to MarketMuse, the optimization tool allows you to “get a quantitative measure of content quality and alignment to user intent.” It additionally provides you recommendations for improvement and real-time feedback on how well your content is optimized for a particular keyword.
How much is it: MarketMuse offers a free version that allows for up to 15 optimizations per month. There are tons of other great features in MarketMuse that you can take advantage of as well.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about the tool, and give it a try, here.
Why I love it: I use the Optimization tool in MarketMuse to optimize new pieces of content (be the articles or pillar content) as they are written, and to do Historical Optimizations as well.
Note: Pillar pages are typically going to target more general, high volume keywords whereas your articles will be targeting more specific, longer tail, and slightly lower volume keywords.
Reporting Phase
Once you hit publish, your job is done, right? Ha. Yeah, right. Now comes the best part: continuous monitoring and reporting. Here are some of the tools I use during this phase:
SEMRush Position Tracking
What it is for: Keyword position monitoring.
What is it: According to the SEMRush website, the Position Tracking Tool allows you to “Track website positions and rankings for any site [and] understand how to rank higher and outshine your competitors.”
How much is it: The Position Tracking Tool is available to try for free on a trial basis and included with most paid packages SEMRush offers. As of this writing, monthly packages run between about $120 and $450 depending upon the full scope of features you want from your SEMRush subscription.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about this particular feature of the larger SEMRush offering here.
Why I love it: I make sure to put all keywords that I’m targeting across my topic cluster strategy into SEMRush’s Position Tracking tool so that I can watch my performance on them. This allows me to see when I start to rank, how quickly I’m moving up, and ultimately identify when it is time to re-optimize content to keep it moving.
Google Search Console
What it is for: Keyword performance monitoring.
What is it: Google Search Console is a tool that allows you to see, in detail, your performance on search engine rankings.
How much is it: Google Search Console is free.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about the tool, and give it a try, here.
Why I love it: Google Search Console is usually a part of any digital marketer’s toolkit for the sheer fact that you can get data right from the source. Find out your average ranking and click-through rates for any search term you rank for on Google's search engine.
This helps you to understand how many people are seeing your content show up in their searches, and how many ultimately choose to click-through to your site. It is my one-stop-shop for finding opportunities to increase my click-through rate from SERP to website.
Bonus points: You can connect Google Search Console to both Google Analytics and HubSpot for deeper insights on the searchers that arrive on your website using specific terms.
HubSpot Topic Cluster Reporting
What it is for: Traffic and conversion monitoring.
What is it: This is reporting part of the same suite of tools covered above with the HubSpot SEO tools.
How much is it: The SEO Tool is available as part of the HubSpot Marketing Hub suite of tools. I use this tool because I use HubSpot for marketing automation as a whole. Prices range significantly depending on what features of the tool you want to use.
Where to learn more about it: You can learn more about the tool here.
Why I love it: If you build your topic clusters out in HubSpot’s SEO tools, it allows you to see analytics for the performance of your cluster as a whole. You can see how the entire group of content (combined reporting on your pillar pages and blogs) is performing in the Analytics section of HubSpot, so long as it has all been defined and linked in the SEO tool. This is great for watching performance and identifying which topics are driving the most results for you once you have multiple topic clusters completed.
Want the Playbooks?
Want detailed playbooks on how to use each of the tools with step-by-step instructions? Looking for more training on how to execute topic clusters successfully (because, let’s be honest, you probably already know you need to do them).
Check out my online course, which compiles nearly 10 years of experience in content strategy and detailed instructions on how to execute a topic cluster strategy to perfection.
