Setting Your Content Clusters & Topics

Where to find it: Dashboard → Content Architecture → Manage Clusters / Manage Topics

Before You Start: What These Are (and What They’re Not)

Content Clusters and Topics are not keyword groups.

They are not based on what people search for.

They are strategic — built around what you want to be known for.

Most sites need fewer than you think:

• Up to ~40 pages → 1–2 Clusters
• 40–100 pages → 2–3 Clusters
• 100–200+ pages → 3–4 Clusters (maximum)

Less is better. A business with one well-defined Cluster and deep, consistent content will outperform a business with five shallow ones every time.

See Content Maturity → for why.

How Clusters and Topics Relate

These are independent — they have a many-to-many relationship, not a parent-child one. A Topic can appear across multiple Clusters. A Cluster contains many Topics. They work together but are set up separately.

They also feed different things in SCOS:

• Clusters → feed Content Architecture Records, GA4 cluster-level performance stats, and strategy reporting
• Topics → feed Content Architecture Records, GA4 topic-level stats, schema sameAs markup, and internal linking logic

The Thinking Process (Do This Before Touching the UI)

The order of thinking is: Known-For Position → Topics → Clusters

Even though Clusters appear first in the UI, they emerge from your topic thinking, not the other way around. Work through this on paper (or in the ALTC Strategy tool) before entering anything into SCOS.

Step 1: Define Your Known-For Position

Ask: What is the single thing this business should be known for?

This is not a tagline. It is not a service list. It is the one defensible authority position that competitors cannot easily copy — the intersection of:

• What you genuinely do differently (your USP)
• What the market is missing or saying poorly (voice gap)
• Who you serve and what they actually need (ICA + service pathway)

Write it as one clear sentence. If you can’t get it to one sentence, the position isn’t clear enough yet.

Example: “Springfield’s integrated counselling + coaching authority for couples and founders — bridging emotional healing and practical forward momentum in a way traditional therapy or coaching alone cannot.”

Step 2: Map Your Topic Taxonomy

Topics are knowledge domains — the subject areas your business can genuinely demonstrate expertise, experience, and authority in.

Think of them as the index at the back of a book — the specific knowledge areas that appear across different pages, chapters, and sections. Topics are the areas of knowledge your business can credibly write about.”

They are stable. They don’t change when your content plan changes. The Definitions are static no matter who is talking about them. They are high-level enough to contain multiple articles, but specific enough to represent a real knowledge domain.

A useful test: Would this topic have its own Wikipedia article?

This is not a coincidence — the Wikipedia match test is a reliable signal that a topic is at the right level of abstraction. Too broad (“Marketing”) fails because it’s not specific enough to your field. Too narrow (“How to write a subject line for a cold email to a plumber”) fails because it’s a tactic, not a knowledge domain.

Target: At least 18 out of 20 topics should map to an exact Wikipedia article. This matters because SCOS uses the Wikipedia URL as the sameAs value in schema markup — connecting your content to a globally recognised knowledge entity, (Entity Mapping) which strengthens semantic authority signals.

Format your taxonomy like this before entering into SCOS:

Aim for 10–20 topics during cluster selection. Later you can narrow it down to the important ones.

10-20 live topics in a strategy works ok for around 20-45 Articles – or plan for 2-3 pieces of supporting (article/case study) content per topic. (so if you are planning 15 articles stick to 3-5 Topics.)

Topics can have parent child relationships, if you have more than 8-10 Group them under 3–6 parent topics – Either the parent or child can be mapped to a piece of content.

Topical Depth is created when you go deep into a specific topic. so don’t feel like more is better.

Step 3: Identify Your Clusters

Once your topic list is clear, look at it and ask: What are the 1–3 strategic lenses through which this business talks about all these topics?

These are your Clusters.

A Cluster is not a topic. It is the angle, audience, and commercial purpose that defines how a set of topics gets discussed. The same topic — say, “Anxiety” — can appear in a Cluster focused on couples, and separately in a Cluster focused on small business founders. Different framing, different audience, different commercial endpoint. Same knowledge domain.

Each Cluster should:

• Support a specific service or offer pathway
• Fill a gap in how competitors are talking about these topics
• Build toward a defined authority position

If you can’t connect a Cluster to a commercial outcome, it shouldn’t be a Cluster.

Entering into SCOS

Once your thinking is done, entering the data is straightforward.

Adding a Cluster

Go to Manage Clusters → Add New

That’s it. The Cluster name and slug are what SCOS uses to tag content, pull performance data, and generate strategy-level reporting. Keep names short, clear and consistent — these will appear in reports and GA4 custom dimensions.

Adding a Topic

Go to Manage Topics → Add New

Finding the SameAs URL:

1. Go to wikipedia.org
2. Search your topic name
3. If an exact-match article exists, copy the URL
4. If no exact match exists, your topic may need to be adjusted — either broader or narrower — until it lands on a real Wikipedia article

If a topic genuinely has no Wikipedia match, it may be too niche, too locally specific, or phrased as a tactic rather than a knowledge domain. Reconsider it before adding.

While there are exceptions, Ideally there should be some highly reputable wiki like alternative that clearly defines and describes the non Wikipedia topic.

After Setup

Once Clusters and Topics are defined, they are available to assign to any content record in SCOS. Each piece of content gets one primary Cluster and one primary Topic — this is how SCOS tracks topical authority maturity, feeds GA4 custom dimensions, and generates schema markup.

See also:

Schema and SameAs →

Content Architecture Records →

Content Maturity →

GA4 Custom Dimensions →