RankEngineRankEngine Help

Topic clusters (pillar + spoke planning)

A topic cluster is one "pillar" article on a broad keyword + 5-10 "spoke" articles on long-tail variations, all internally linked. It's the most reliable content structure for ranking competitive keywords in 2026.

How RankEngine plans them

  1. Content Studio → Plan tab → Add pillar.
  2. Enter a hub keyword (e.g. "kids hydration").
  3. RankEngine researches related keywords, scores them by specificity, dedupes near-duplicates, and tags each by search intent (informational/commercial/transactional/navigational).
  4. Pick 5-10 spokes from the suggestions. Each becomes a separate article queued in the calendar.
  5. Generate all of them — pillar gets 5000+ words, spokes get 3000+. Each spoke links back to the pillar; the pillar links to all spokes; sibling spokes cross-reference contextually.

Why this structure?

  • SEO: Google's BERT understands topical depth — a cluster signals authority on the hub keyword.
  • AI search: ChatGPT and Perplexity cite cluster pages more often because the cross-links create "dense topical neighborhoods."
  • UX: users who land on a spoke see "related articles" rail with the pillar + sibling spokes, increasing pages-per-session.

What's in the works

The current Plan tab supports pillar + spoke planning. The full Specificity SEO pipeline (50-keyword research with scoring + intent tagging + auto-cross-linking) is rolling out in phases — see What's New.

Usage

Keyword research is cached for repeat planning. Article generation uses the RankEngine AI wallet and shows the action before work starts.

Related