Topics, Grammars and Keyword Clustering

What are topics?

Topics are groups of keywords discussing the same thing. This includes: search queries that mean exactly the same thing but have been expressed slightly differently, or a mix of those keywords with a few more general and specific topics. While comprehensive, large keyword lists can be difficult to interpret and act upon, sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. Topics cluster keywords into meaningfully named groups.

What are topics useful for?

Matching topics to your site means understanding how your users think and search for your content. You can use this to organize a site in a more user-centric way. You can work out the right demand-driven taxonomy for a site. You can find the best facets or filters that align with your users’ mental models. You can identify missing pages that will drive revenue.

Topics represent demand in the business’s language. Reporting that uses them translates complex demand data into understandable terms for everyone, from the C-suite downward.

Topics structure demand data, allowing you to predict current and future consumer needs. For instance, you might use topic data to decide which brands or product lines to stock.

The 'Top topics' view shows the top topics by search volume. In addition, the 'Top topics' view can optionally be seen with the keywords per topic ("Top topics & keywords") or with the pages that rank for a topic ("Top topics & pages").

How does Site Topic cluster keywords into topics?

Site Topic takes raw keyword data and identifies meaningful “labels”. A label is one or more words that means something different than the sum of its parts. For instance, dress shirt means something very different than dress or shirt separately (and different from shirt dress!).

Each label belongs to a label group. For instance, dress, shirt, shirt dress, and dress shirt are all examples of a cateogry label group. We write labels and label groups like code. Instead of “red is a colour”, we write colour: red.

Sometimes, people don’t explicitly state what they’re looking for when they search. Instead, much of the meaning is implicit, but obvious to other humans. For instance, searching for iphone 15 implies looking for an Apple product. So, we’d add brand: apple to the labels for that keyword.

Keywords are often misspelled or expressed with different synonyms. Site Topic standardizes around one label to cover all expressions.

What is keyword clustering?

Keyword clustering is the process of grouping keywords into topics.

What are grammars?

We call combinations of label groups a 'grammar'. Grammars represent common ways of searching and common page types. For instance, brand + category is a common popular grammar, which covers things like ninja air fryer, nike sneakers or blackrock etf (although for each site, it's likely that a grammar will be more specific).

What are grammars useful for?

Grammars are useful to understand from what type of queries your competitors get the lion's share of their traffic. If you don't have a page type matching that, it might be worth adding one. They can also be used to filter topics to focus in on a certain kind of search.

The 'top grammars' view shows the top grammars by search volume. You can click on the label groups to build up a grammar, then choose the labels from each label group dropdown. Saving will add your grammar to a dropdown which can be used to filter any 'Top topics' view.