A few years ago, my team inadvertently built a unique process that revved-up organic conversions on Tipalti’s finance blog.
The new process allowed us to leverage Tipalti’s SEO topic clusters in a way that perfectly coincided with our CRO & web personalization goals which effectively led to overshooting our annual SQL goals (see Tipalti’s Path to 5X SEO Growth as a FinTech Unicorn).
Until now, I haven’t officially published this discovery and I’m kicking myself for not sharing these ideas sooner. But I’m here now, and it’s about time this knowledge is shared.
Here’s how the program worked
The Topic Clustering Part
Topic clustering, for those who are familiar, is a framework for categorizing and interlinking related pages and posts. For many years, I also referred to this as a “Hub and Spoke strategy.”
This article assumes that the reader already has a foundational understanding of topic clustering (if you don’t, I recommend Hubspot’s guide), so I’ll only be painting over topic clusters in broad strokes.
Each cluster is comprised of a single pillar page (a.k.a. “hub page”) and many more child pages (a.k.a. “spokes) as pictured below.
Advanced SEO programs utilize these topic clusters to interlink between hub and spoke pages, which pass authority and topical relevance signals throughout each cluster, thus strengthening the SEO performance of each group.
One of the ways we did this on Tipalti’s blog was with a tagging system and a sidebar module that looks like this.
But topic clustering alone only takes SEO performance so far.
It enables teams to grow rankings and clicks to their competitive keyword sets, but it doesn’t increase the conversion rates for visitors after they’ve landed on the page.
As a performance leader, my job was to grow total organic leads for Tipalti which included building a CRO program that would bring qualified leads all the way through to pipeline.
While we successfully grew Tipalti’s traffic, it was the CRO strategy that had the largest direct impact on my team’s SQL goals.
In a nutshell, the same interlinked topic clusters provided a perfect infrastructure for CRO.
The CRO Part
When most people think of CRO, they think “A/B testing.”
Although we DID leverage A/B testing to measure the results of this CRO program, I’m going to talk very little about A/B testing as it’s not the core component of this process.
The core component here is web personalization.
Most company blogs either don’t have a CTA at all, or are guilty of utilizing the same CTA across all of their pages and posts.
What we wanted to do was personalize our CTAs and gated assets (a.k.a. “lead magnets”) to cater to various users and search intents.
If a user came to us searching for B2B payments, we wanted to entice them with a free asset that would pique their interest, based on the keywords and pages our users landed on.
I soon realized that the topic clustering infrastructure we previously built throughout the company blog was perfectly-suited for aligning CTAs + gated assets that would be individually-tailored to the informational intents of our visitors.
All we had to do was overlay these unique CTA / asset combos on top of our SEO infrastructure.
If you visited the site looking for payment knowledge, we’d offer a payments guide.
If you visited the site to learn about accounts payable, we’d offer an accounts payable guide.
And the same personalized experience would be applied for every topic cluster.
Cluster-CTA Pairings Visualized
The CTA
Importantly, we started with a basic in-line CTA. But further testing led us to custom-building a hero CTA with teaser text and a dynamic link corresponding to the gated asset in the topic cluster (again, using our CMS tagging system).
Custom development was required to maintain the H1 alongside our dynamic CTA within the hero.
Conclusion
And there you have it, a simple yet powerful one-two-punch to leverage your site’s topic cluster infrastructures for CRO & web personalization.
For my program, the process has been so valuable that I’ve also incorporated with every company that I do consulting for.
It truly is the game-changer of game-changers for my B2B programs and I anticipate that I’ll be incorporating it in programs for as long as it’s success remains measurable.
Soon, I believe I’ll follow this piece up by showcasing my topic clustering process. For teams that haven’t yet built out their topic clusters and personalized gated assets, the follow-on content here will help you see how I do it.
