You are very welcome – glad it helped!

That makes sense, and it cleared up my questions. I’ll start focusing on just a few clusters for now 🙂 Thank you!

I wouldn’t go too mad with pillar content at your stage. When you are just starting out it’s best to focus on just having a few really strong content clusters with 1 piece of pillar content per cluster. So, with my fakeaway example, I would just stick to 3-4 different types of fakeaway and write 1 pillar post for each. In the fullness of time you can have pillar content for sub categories and/or more clusters on different types of fakeaway. Remember content clusters is all about building topical authority on a specific niche topic. You cannot build topical authority on something so general as ‘sides’ or ‘mains’. But if your blog was say all about Chinese food, then you could build topical authority on things like ‘Chinese sides’, ‘Chinese sauces’, ‘Chinese mains’ and ‘Chinese desserts’. It’s kind of hard to answer your other questions without knowing your niche. But, in general, less is more when it comes to categories… at least when you are starting out. Think about 3-4 aspects of your main niche that you want to focus on FIRST and build out strong topic clusters for each of those. THEN start adding more complexity. Eb 🙂

That makes sense, thank you!
In that case, if you had sub-categories like “sides” and “main dishes”, would you create pillar content for those as well, besides the “curry” and “Chinese takeaway dishes” clusters?
Also, do I need to write pillar content for all content clusters? I’m confused about this because:
1. I’m not sure which clusters to highlight in my menu if I have many topic clusters (which is common for food bloggers, such as “sides,” “main,” “curry,” “pizza,” etc.).
2. I’m not sure how to write effective pillar content for a content cluster built around a specific ingredient. For example, in the “fakeaway” niche, you could have clusters like “fakeaway recipes with chicken” or “Chinese takeaway dishes with chicken.”
Please let me know if this doesn’t make sense…!

‘Recipes’ is way too broad. Topical authority on a food blog is around something much more specific – for starters your niche needs to be much tighter that ‘recipes’. And then within that niche you can build up some even more niched topical authority. So, for example, your niche could be ‘fakeaway recipes’ and within that niche you could develop topical authority around ‘curry’, ‘Chinese takeaway dishes’ and ‘pizza’. I see it again and again when I do keyword research – the food blogs which are outranking their much higher authority competitors are always food blogs which are well niched down and have strong topical authority. And yes, in the food niche a pillar post can be a roundup post – but it should be a really strong roundup post with lots of additional information, not just a list. As to your last question either is possible – it depends on your niche and how possible it is to build multiple topic clusters under one category. So to take up the fakeaway example again, maybe under ‘Chinese takeaway dishes’ you might eventually develop several topic clusters focused on different sub-niches of Chinese cooking.

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