An SEO Strategy that Drives Real Results

Three Key Opportunities

The insurance industry is a highly competitive landscape, and the client had a limited marketing budget compared to other well-known competitors. 

The client was struggling to rank for top key non-brand terms on Google.

They needed to create a sustainable, long-term SEO strategy to improve organic search results and ultimately convert sales.

Our Approach to Implementing an Effective Topic Clustering Strategy

 The client needed an effective SEO strategy to increase rankings and drive organic traffic. By utilizing an effective topic clustering strategy, Noble Studios was able to drive sustainable, long-term success on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) that mirrored the client’s long-standing legacy as a leading insurance company. Our topic clustering strategy also allowed the client to stand out in a highly competitive market. Take a look at our approach.

In-depth Keyword Research: The team conducted extensive keyword research for each insurance product category, identifying key terms and search intents across the customer journey. This formed the foundation for content planning and topic cluster structuring.

Stakeholder Interviews: These interviews allow us to gather expert knowledge about our client’s products and services. This ensures content accurately reflects the client’s offerings and industry expertise.

Competitor Audits: Noble analyzed competitor strategies, identifying gaps between the client’s existing content and competitor offerings. This helped shape the content strategy and reveal new opportunities. 

Using these insights, we were able to map out content plans for each topic cluster, grouping keywords with similar intent.

Building Authority through Pillar Pages

In recent years, search engines have updated their algorithms to favor content that is grouped into clear, distinguishable topics. To take advantage of this, we mapped out topic clusters and focused on building the clients’ authority through pillar and cluster pages. Pillar pages, or hub pages, are typically product pages for B2B clients. Each topic cluster is anchored by a pillar page which allows the client to build rankings around specific keywords such as “business insurance” and “commercial auto insurance.” By establishing authority through these pillar pages, we signaled to search engines that the client’s website content is credible, trustworthy and valuable to users—leading to improved search rankings. In the highly competitive insurance industry, where many companies are vying for the same keywords, building this authority was crucial for our client to drive organic traffic and attract high-quality leads. This strategy involved three key components:

1. Topic structuring: structuring URLs to reflect topic relationships.
2. Building a substantial backlog of topic-specific content
3. Implementing robust internal linking between related pages

Structuring URLs Around Topic Clusters

When implementing an effective topic clustering strategy for our Fortune 500 insurance company client, Noble Studios needed an SEO strategy that would help our client move up the SERPs. Traditionally, content is housed on a website based on the type of content or where it lives on the website (e.g., domain.com/blog/article-title). However, our topic clustering model broke this mold and instead is structured under the topic category. For instance, the commercial auto insurance product page served as a pillar, with all related content like “Cost of commercial auto insurance” and “Who needs commercial auto insurance” nested under it (e.g., domain.com/commercial-auto-insurance/cost). This approach reinforces the relationship between the client’s content within a topic cluster, signaling to search engines that our client is an authority on this topic. This strategy helped our client to effectively compete against other well-known insurance brands and significantly improve their search result rankings for key business insurance terms.

A Long-Term, Sustainable Solution

By writing topic-driven content and structuring in a topic cluster model, we were able to establish the client as an authoritative voice in the business insurance space. Noble Studios developed between 200 and 240 pieces of SEO-informed content annually. These pieces of content, whether they were optimizations or new content, addressed every stage of the customer journey, from the awareness to the decision-making stage. By the end of our work, we had covered all the key pillars of their business (ie. business insurance, auto insurance, etc.), with each pillar consistently ranking in the top one to three positions on Google.