Clustering vs Straight Intent

Lately I've been thinking about this topic. Which strategy could be my powerful in the long term: clustering vs going for the straight intent

According to the Google's guidelines, the straight intent is obviously better, regardless if it's sometimes considered "thin content" (as long as you focus on targeting a specific query you already know it's been searched)

The thing is that in 2018 I saw a clear proliferation of clusters that in 2019 are still happening (but have slightly decelerated). Generally when something proliferates might mean, that somehow it makes sense or its working in terms of ranking.

So lets put an example

Option A:
- All about Terriers in a 1-pager
-> Characteristics (600 words)
-> Types (800 words)
-> Breeding (500 words)
-> etc... (1500 words)
Total: 3400 words article

Option B:
- Terriers Characteristics page (600 words)
- Terriers Types page (800 words)
- Terriers Breeding page (500 words)
- Other Terriers things (1500 words)

Let's say that after a research we find that top searches are (this is all made up for the example)

"terriers" ~ 40k/mo
"terriers characteristics" ~ 30k/mo
"terriers breeding" ~ 10k/mo
(other keywords relating to terriers" ~ 10k/mo

Technically if a user searches for "Terriers Characteristics" then technically with equal reputation Option B "Terriers Characteristics page" may show up than the Option A 1 pager, because it "perfectly satisfies the query".

If users looks for "terriers" Option A may show up, because it's such a generic query, that, the more information, the better.

After this I got to a simple conclusion

A) If the "generic" query has more searches than all the specific queries summed up, then going for the Option A is a better idea
B) Otherwise, if the specific queries may have more searches, "divide and rule" should be the way to go.

Regardless of this, I see that most SEO are still going for Option A all the way. Why? Maybe because it's simpler and can still rank adequately for some specific queries? Maybe Google is not "intelligent" enough to see the differences between a too broad cluster with a lot of subsections vs an individual perfectly targeted site?

What about TOC in this scenario?

Do they help fulfil an intention straight away as if we were talking about a specific query? Has anyone tested in terms of intent satisfaction?

From my own experience, TOC can satisfy intents, for example when a user is looking for certain feature in a country, Wikipedia for that given country may show up as a top result, despite the fact that the answer is within the content in a subsection. But, if there is a thorough article (on wikipedia), that talks about it, it will always show instead of the more general alternative. So this makes the topic a little more complex.

I am a fan of option B - building multiple pages for the topic. You get a Content Cluster with several URLs which are linking to each other. I think you get in sum more Power because you can send more signals To the Search Engine (titles, URLs, Internal Links, ...). That is how semantic works I guess.

seoblox said:

I am a fan of option B - building multiple pages for the topic. You get a Content Cluster with several URLs which are linking to each other. I think you get in sum more Power because you can send more signals To the Search Engine (titles, URLs, Internal Links, ...). That is how semantic works I guess.

Click to expand...

Makes a lot of sense. But there is also a hypothesis (untested by me) that suggests that the high traffic destinations create a lot of synergies with other related keywords. So for example, if each of the sites are getting 200visits on average (5 pages for example), combining them, could get not only 200x5 + a synergy boost of maybe 500 extra visits (because the one-pager with 1000 visits is more authoritative). Also the process of linking is way simpler with a one-pager. Not sure if this synergy also comes from this circumstance (the fact that is not the same building 5 links for each of the 5 pages than building 25 links for just 1 page).

Query satisfaction. Option B > Option A
Reputation/Authoritativeness. Option A > Option B
Technically Option B will be getting less bounce rate than Option A
But for some reason Google also thinks that giving complementary information to a topic is also good (i.e. the alt special blocks that gives with certain famous people, like "users also search this other famous people")



I've written this because I'm also the Option B style of SEO. But ATM I'm seriously thinking on switching full Option A.