Playbook · SEO
Publishing a long-tail cluster
If your product has sixty integrations, there are sixty searches of the form “[you] + [tool]”, and probably four pages. The same is true of use cases, industries and templates.
The pages share a structure, which makes them quick to produce. The risk is producing sixty copies of one page with a name swapped in. This playbook is about getting the speed without that.
The steps
6 steps- 1Choose one set and list every member
- 2Write one brief for the page type
- 3Gather the facts before drafting
- 4Draft, then read every page
- 5Publish as a cluster with a hub
- 6Prune after a fair run
Use this when
- Your product has a list of twenty or more comparable things: integrations, use cases, industries, templates.
- Search Console shows impressions for “[you] + [something]” searches with no dedicated page.
- You have the capacity to review every page, not just to generate it.
The steps
6 steps, in order
How to turn a list of integrations, use cases or templates into a set of pages that each say something real.
- 1
Choose one set and list every member
Do not mix page types. Pick integrations, or use cases, or templates, and list every item in the set. Check each against search demand and against whether you can say something specific about it.
- 2
Write one brief for the page type
Decide the sections every page in the set will have, and what must be different on each. For an integration page that might be: what the two tools do together, which data moves in which direction, how to set it up, and what it costs.
- Sections shared across the set
- The facts that must be unique to each page
- Where those facts come from
- Internal links each page must include
- 3
Gather the facts before drafting
The unique facts are the page. Collect them first, from your product team for anything about your own product and from public sources for the rest. A page with no unique facts should not be written.
- 4
Draft, then read every page
Draft the set against the brief. Then have a person read each one, checking the facts and cutting anything that would be equally true of every other page in the set.
- 5
Publish as a cluster with a hub
Publish the set together, with a hub page that lists and links to all of them, and links between closely related pages. A set of pages with no links in is hard for a search engine to find and weigh.
- 6
Prune after a fair run
Give the pages a few months. Improve the ones earning impressions. Merge or remove the ones earning none, so the set stays worth crawling.
What goes wrong
The mistakes to avoid
Find-and-replace pages
If the only thing that changes between two pages is a name, search engines treat them as one page, and readers leave.
Publishing without a hub
Sixty pages nobody links to are sixty orphans. The hub is what tells a crawler they belong together.
Never revisiting the set
Integrations are added and retired. A stale page that describes a feature you removed is worse than no page.
How to tell it worked
Share of pages in the set earning impressions after three months.
Total clicks to the cluster, not to any single page.
Sign-ups that begin on a page in the set.
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