A case for content clustering in Finance Institutions in Kenya
Working with financial institutions in Kenya that want to benefit from organic search traffic, I have noted that most are going to try to rank for technical terms (that they have coined themselves) while their audience ain’t really looking for that.
Their customers are searching for other simpler terms.
Layman terms.
If you have not really invested in knowing what they are searching for on their mobile phones and laptops, you lose out.
You will spend a long time trying to wrack your brain on why you are not getting traffic to your pages.
I will use the example of trade finance.
It is a lucrative field for financial institutions.
Unfortunately, not many customers will search for the terms’ trade finance’ on their devices when searching for a financial institution to offer them the service.
My keyword research tool shows that ‘trade finance’ is being searched for by about 150 Kenyans per month.
Ranking for that term is also difficult judging by the keyword difficulty shown here.
Instead, what they are looking for is some of the elements of trade finance.
Some of these include:
- Lpo financing
- Letters of credit
- Advance payment guarantee
- Bid bonds
Lpo financing actually has a better search volume and less keyword difficulty
Looking at the data from ahrefs, I found out that caritas bank is ranking for the term ‘lpo financing’ and is getting about 185.
KCB is also getting a good chunk of this traffic with keywords such as ‘lpo financing’, ‘lpo financing in kenya’ and lpo.
Though bank guarantee also has a sizeable search volume, it also has a tough keyword difficulty.
Gtbank is ranking for bank guarantee and this screenshot shows an estimate of the traffic that it is getting:
I could go on and on with the other elements that financial institutions call trade finance products.
I would continue proving that you need to create individual pages on the different elements of the topic.
That brings me to the heart of this blog.
The need for content clustering
It is a concept that has been there for a long time.
Other SEOs might call it siloing, content hubs or creating topical relevance.
What does it involve?
It consists of identifying the cornerstone content and its support pages.
You will create the pillar content page and the support pages while interlinking all.
Here is a diagram showing how this will appear.
Trade finance would be the pillar page with other supporting pages that link to it.
The pillar page will also link to these support pages.
In this way, you find that you will not only rank for the term ‘trade finance’ but also other terms such as ‘lpo financing’, ‘letters of credit’, ‘bid bond’ etc.
So how do you do content clustering in your SEO strategy?
- Identify the seed topic that you want to rank for.
- Make sure that it has a sizeable search volume.
- Identify keywords that your users are using to get elements in your seed topic
- Do a keyword search volume research of these element keywords
- Create a page on the seed topic
- Create supporting pages with the element keywords
- Interlink these pages.