Using Wikipedia to create a topic cluster

Does Wikipedia give you enough data to create a topic cluster (for a niche you know nothing about)?

Let’s find out…

DISCLAIMER: If you want to build a comprehensive topic cluster, there’s no substitute for proper researchBUT, that’s not always possible (no budget/time, etc)

Treat this as minimum viable niche research (MVNR) which I sadly don’t see catching on as the next big #SEO acronym 😅

Step 1

For this example, let’s build a simple content plan around the topic *personal injury lawyer*

(which I know NOTHING about)

First up, see if theres a wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_injury_lawyer

Step 2

Run the wiki page through Ahrefs & review the keywords it ranks for.

Look for terms you could split into standalone articles.

You want to see keywords with a clear intent so you can directly answer the query (so you have a chance of competing).

If you are on a budget and don’t have Ahrefs, you can do the same with the Keywords Everywhere add-on:

* Do a site: search in Google for your URL
* Click on Total keywords
* Repeat the process

Step 3

Now copy the wiki page URL and run it through MissingTopics.

This is a great FREE tool for finding the most important topics + entities on pages.

https://missingtopics.com/topics

You’ll now have a list of (you guessed it) missing topics:

* Copy these
* Clean them up (remove numbers, brackets ect)
* Use as seed keywords in Ahrefs…

Oh, just make sure you review the topics/seeds before pasting them into Ahrefs.

In this example, one of the topics was ‘united states’ which will obviously skew your results.

Anyway…

Step 4

Go to Ahrefs keyword explorer and paste in the missing topics as seeds.

Then apply these filters:

* Select Questions
* Terms match
* Set a minimum volume

Step 5

Review the keywords & look for terms to add to your cluster.

The good thing about this method is you may uncover terms you didn’t know existed (because you don’t know the niche).

Fairly quickly I’ve got a list of informational terms to go after.

Is this going to be the most comprehensive cluster? No.

But it’s a starting point and not bad considering I know NOTHING about the niche.


This process took like 5 minutes, and I found a good amount of keywords to create content around.

When you are working in niches you don’t have a working knowledge of, you don’t know what you don’t know.

That’s where this lil’ wiki method can help.

If you want to go further:

Fire up the Detailed SEO extension:
https://detailed.com/extension/

* Go to the wiki page from the start
* Click Links then export complete links
* Look through this data to find related wiki pages being internally linked to.

These are future topics you can repeat this process for (or just include in supporting content)

So in answer to the original question:

Does Wikipedia give you enough data to create a topic cluster (for a niche you know nothing about)?

Yeah, but you’ll still need to use your SEO skills + brain 🧠