Build authority on subjects,
not scattered one off pages

A pillar is the broader subject a brand wants to be known for; a support is a specific question inside it. Project management software is a pillar, the kind of subject a real authority writes a reference page about. How to choose a tool for a five-person team is a support that lives inside it. The pillar page is the deep reference; supports are focused articles that link back. Both Google and answer engines reward the structure because it signals real depth.

Anywhere. Your own research from a discovery session. The continuous question mining Ranko runs across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. An export from another tool. An agency spreadsheet. A strategy-meeting brain dump. A competitor's sitemap. Your content audit. The clustering brain takes raw input in any shape and turns it into pillars with supports, so the keyword lists sitting unused in shared drives for years finally become useful.

Five is the minimum for credibility, fifteen the maximum for focus. A pillar with only three supports does not signal authority; it looks like a few loosely related articles. A pillar with twenty-five spreads thin across what is really multiple pillars. Five to fifteen is deep enough to compete and focused enough to stay about one thing. When a cluster needs more than fifteen, Ranko splits the extras into a related pillar.

Every cluster is most of the way to a brief. The pillar topic, rationale, supporting topics, linking targets, and the questions each support answers are attached from the moment it is built. When ready to write, the team hands the cluster to Content Forge and the briefs come out structured for Google and answer engines: a pillar page brief and support briefs. The work that took a strategist an afternoon is now automatic.

Ranko places the keyword in the cluster where it fits best and flags the others where it has secondary relevance. The primary placement determines which pillar page that content links back to and where the support article lives in the site. The secondary flags surface in the related clusters, so the team decides whether to add a sideways link or leave the overlap alone. The team always has the final say; Ranko surfaces the situation rather than deciding unilaterally.

Topic Planner builds a ranked publishing calendar; Topic Clusters builds a topical authority structure. Topic Planner takes one topic and gives a ranked ninety-day plan ordered by opportunity gap, answering what to publish this quarter and in what order. Topic Clusters takes a raw keyword list of any size and gives the pillar-plus-support structure that earns authority, answering what subjects you want to own and how the pieces connect. Most teams use both. Different jobs, same engine.