To cover a topic, answer the cluster of questions that buyers ask about it. One page with the topic in the title is not coverage.

​
Why one page is rarely sufficient

An answer engine expands a buyer question into many retrieval queries. Usually, one page answers one or two of these queries well, and the other queries only briefly. Thus, the answer engine retrieves the page for only a part of the cluster. Coverage means that your site has an answer for each question in the cluster. Each answer must be real, not only a mention.

​
Find the cluster

Use the query fanouts for the topic. Query fanouts are the expansion of the question by the answer engine itself. Thus, they give a better map of the cluster than an internal guess. Group the query fanouts by intent. For example, put the query fanouts about price together, and put the query fanouts about integrations together. Each group is a candidate for one piece of content.

​
Depth before breadth

A frequent failure is one page for each query fanout. Thin pages give answer engines nothing to quote. They also compete with each other, and they signal low quality. One substantial piece that answers a coherent group is better than five pages that each answer only half of one query fanout.

​
Know when a topic is covered

A topic is not covered when you publish. It is covered when the conversations show you in many scenarios of the topic, not only in one scenario. Read Scenario performance. A topic can look covered but show uneven results across its scenarios. This is the clearest sign that the coverage is only in name, not real.