Pillar content, a longstanding yet often overlooked strategy in content marketing, effectively boosts SEO and user engagement. This approach structures information around core topics, enhancing reach and relevance compared to traditional content methods.
Now, let’s look into defining what pillar content entails.
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What is Pillar Content?
Pillar content, designed to be comprehensive and valuable, functions as a foundational element in an organic SEO strategy, aiming to rank for a wide array of related search terms.
This type of content acts as a central hub, supporting various other content forms by providing in-depth exploration of broad topics. It transcends mere product lists or succinct articles that address singular queries, offering detailed insights across expansive subjects instead.
As we explore the utility and strategic application of pillar content, the question naturally arises as to what purposes pillar content serves, and that is what we will find out.
What is Pillar Content For?
Pillar content, structured around “topic clusters,” effectively enhances SEO by interlinking closely related topics.
When individuals search for specific items—like a type of food—they use precise terms rather than broad categories, demonstrating that relevance in topics can be as critical as keyword focus. Such detailed content development elevates a site’s authority on particular subjects, which single blog posts may need to address comprehensively.
Pillar pages delve deeply into a main topic, supported by additional site content and marketing approaches, thereby maximizing value to readers and improving search engine rankings.
Unlike traditional content that often pushes toward product pages, pillar content primarily boosts brand awareness or authority, aiming not only at immediate customer conversion but also long-term reputational gains.
Exploring the benefits of pillar content versus traditional blog posts may reveal further advantages in content strategy and audience engagement.
How Would Pillar Content Help Compared to a Blog Post?
Content pillars serve as comprehensive resources, gathering extensive details on a subject in a single authoritative location. For instance, if you’re exploring various bedding options, a content pillar might encompass everything from bed styles and brands to mattress types aimed specifically at potential buyers like you.
Unlike isolated articles that discuss “The 10 Best Bed Companies in 2023” or personal experiences like switching beds to improve posture, content pillars provide a broad spectrum of information relevant to your search.
These foundational pages often become the initial point of contact for users addressing specific queries, like those related to beds. As we consider the advantages of this strategy, we segue into understanding how pillar content can benefit your site.
How Does Pillar Content Benefit Your Site?
By producing a top-level pillar post, you can build a solid foundation for the rest of your marketing strategy. No matter how you create content, your audience will always be able to return to the central pillar of that content cluster to get the answers that they need.
However, this is not the only benefit. Having proper foundations allows you to do a lot more with the way that you draw potential customers into your marketing funnel.
Pillar Content Appears First in Search Engine Rankings
In general, pillar content is often going to be something like an “ultimate guide” article or another piece of content that presents a lot of information in a well-structured way.
This makes it an incredibly important resource for a lot of different questions or concerns, meaning that it is useful to a wide target audience.
Due to this, it is often going to appear on the first page of results for a range of search types, as long as you target relevant keywords and get the page ranking well in the first place.
A typical content pillar pulls entire topic clusters into a single article, serving as the main pillar for that entire topic. This means that a single, very information-heavy article will appear more often than a short and niche blog post.
This might not sound like much, but it means that users are much more likely to have that page as their first encounter with your site. That means that they immediately see you as a major resource for that core topic since they are being shown high-value content first.
Topic Clusters Prevent Internal Competition
While creating high-quality content for every niche question or exact keyword used to be the standard, this has meant that a lot of sites run into problems with existing content. Namely, that pages often conflict or compete with one another.
A resource pillar page bundles a lot of similar subtopics and questions into a single page that covers the whole broad topic, meaning that all users are being directed to the same comprehensive resource. This limits the chances of your content conflicting with itself when users use vague search terms.
From there, the site owner can begin creating content focused on more exact niches, tying it all back to the pillar with links or offhand references.
This means that you can focus on producing niche blog content only when you need to answer a more exact or lesser-searched question that the pillar did not cover.
Pillar Content Gives a Complete, Authoritative Answer
Authority is not just a measurement used to check how pages rank in search engines but also part of how your audience sees your site.
If you are perceived as the authority behind a exact topic, more and more people are going to turn to your site for issues related to it.
Creating pillar content allows you to merge a lot of smaller articles together, explaining the core topic in much greater detail and giving a more comprehensive answer to whatever question the user has.
This lets the pillar cover a broad range of search intents all at once, which gives it a wider reach and also more value overall. Instead of having to look for multiple articles and finding a mixture of sources from different sites, your pillar content becomes a one-stop solution.
Thanks to this, pillar articles can make a site seem like much more of an authority on a topic. This not only gives the site a stronger reputation as a trustworthy source of news and information but also tends to make the pillar articles snowball in popularity over time.
A Pillar Page Is A Great Resource
Speaking of resources, one of the main advantages of pillar pages is how easily they can grow in popularity.
Well-made pillar page content can become a consistent resource for certain sites, meaning more incoming links and, therefore, SEO boosts – which will eventually compound on itself over and over again.
Even without the SEO angle, a pillar page strategy provides a central piece of content that users may keep coming back to or referring others to. This means more traffic and many more chances to potentially earn some new customers.
Beyond that, good content pillars often spread quite quickly. If you offer the best resource for something, it is only natural to see it mentioned on related blog posts on other sites or appearing in forums. From there, your content pillar posts can get even more traction.
How to Create a Content Pillar Strategy
Content pillars are invaluable for both SEO and general traffic and engagement benefits, but it can seem daunting at first.
Thankfully, a good content pillar page does not necessarily need to be difficult to make – it just needs to be put together in the right way.
Know Your Audience
Look into what your audience is searching for. Do keyword research, check the search volume of exact keywords that you already use, and try to understand what potential customers are looking for.
Pillar content does not necessarily need to focus on the highest-search-volume keywords to be effective, but it is important to know some basic search-volume statistics anyway.
In general, you want to have an idea of how your audience is behaving and what it is they search for.
Going into a project like this with no data or expectations related to audience behavior only makes it harder to create a pillar that will appeal to them.
With pillar content, you are trying to capture as many relevant topics that are relevant to your target audiences as possible, and search volume can help with that.
It is not just search volume that matters, though. Learning how to judge things like search intent or exact demographic information can help quite a lot in exact markets.
The more you know regarding your general audience, the easier it gets to target pillar content at them directly, ensuring a much higher chance of success if you can get everything planned out well.
Start With The Topic
Whether you try to map the topic out in a spiderweb graph or just start writing out a list of content ideas, it is important to understand what the core topic of your pillar page will be.
Content pillars need one broad topic to work well – a product type, an industry, or a detailed action.
It is important to choose a topic that can be broken down into multiple sub-topics, ideally with those also having sub-topics of their own. This gives your pillar page a wide range of information to provide, as well as a clear structure in how it should be written.
Creating good cornerstone content requires that you have a lot of information to work with because simply padding out the word count will not help. A pillar needs to be meaty and valuable to have the proper effect.
This means keeping the topic broad but not so broad that it becomes a disorganized mess. Your pillar posts have to be useful to an audience, but you will not want to write pillar content that only has a few hundred words of actual information.
Remember: the more words you need to describe your topic, the narrower it is. It needs to relate to your industry and website, but not so much that it becomes impenetrable to anybody except a very small audience.
Consider Your Role in the Pillar Post
It is important to think regarding how central to the pillar strategy your own brand will be. In some cases, it might be fine to link to a range of other guides on your own website, but in other cases, it might actively devalue the content due to coming across more like marketing copy.
Your content pillar page is meant to be a resource first and foremost and a marketing tool second. You do not want to link to other content pieces unless they are relevant and might provide value to the users that are reading or if they are vital to your wider marketing campaign.
Why? Well, consider how the page content reads. An “ultimate guide to social media popularity” feels a lot less honest if every section on social media tools makes sure to promote the site owner’s own social media services constantly.
Ideally, try to find a 50/50 ratio between mentioning yourself and mentioning other sources, and do not be afraid to link to resources outside of your own site.
The point is to create content that users trust and find helpful and that is more valuable than a blatant advertising link in the middle of your content pillar.
If you do not have any blog posts or relevant articles to link to, then do not force more links into the pillar.
If you write new content to supplement the content pillar strategy, that is different because you are creating something that works alongside the cluster content within the content pillar.
Create Good Content
The easiest way to get started with a content pillar strategy is to simply begin writing cluster content around your chosen content strategy theme. Starting with a broad outline is the easiest way to understand how the pillar post needs to be laid out, and it also helps to look at other content you have created that lines up with the content pillar topic.
It is a good idea to look into topics that you have never covered before, too. Pillar content is often called cornerstone content because it forms the cornerstone of a topic, and that means that you need to focus on the entire niche – not just the parts you are familiar with.
Create a more broad and informative version of whatever information you think fits, and then fill in any gaps you can find. Cover topics you have not covered before, and write content that nobody else seems to have written. If no tutorial exists for something, write it yourself.
Content pillar pages work best when they fill in gaps and provide information that no other source does. You want to write a high-content pillar page that offers more than other articles do, rather than just rewriting existing long-form content from other sources and adding nothing else.
After that, you can flesh out what you have created and add extra value – videos, graphs, infographics, or anything else that might generate traffic and garner more attention. For example, a step-by-step guide might contain video tutorials for each major step.
You do not have to worry regarding linking right away, whether that is linking to other supporting details or just other pages within your site. It is best to finish organizing content and writing the overall pillar first to ensure that it sounds natural and stays focused on the core topic.
Publish The Pillar
Publishing your pillar content is not too difficult – it is just like any other article, only on a much larger scale. You still need to consider things like the exact keywords you are using, the title and description tags, and anything else that might influence SEO or incoming website traffic.
Make sure that you optimize the metadata, the title, and any other search engine optimization features you need. You want to have the page appear in search engine results as often as possible and to do proper keyword research so that you can understand which search results make the best targets.
Remember that this may be the landing page for a lot of traffic going forward, so keep the organic traffic in mind. Organic traffic can come from any number of search intents and keywords, including searches that you did not even plan for.
Users will be coming from both contextually relevant links in other content and from organic searches on search engines. In either case, there could be multiple dozens of different search intents and goals to consider – but as long as they are visiting, your pillar is working.
If you do not need the pillar post to be on your own site, then it can sometimes be a good idea to put the content pillar on a special URL. This can make it more distinct and give it more of an identity separate from your own brand, but this is not the ideal option in every situation.
Monitor and Grow Your Content on Search Engines
Monitoring the performance of a pillar page is crucial to understanding its impact and ensuring it meets audience needs. Regularly tracking engagement metrics and search trends allows you to identify emerging topics and gaps in your content.
As market dynamics shift, incorporating new long-tail keywords and updating outdated information are essential to maintaining relevance. This ongoing process of adaptation and optimization enhances the pillar content and ensures it aligns with current audience interests and search behaviors.
You can effectively update and refine your strategy by staying responsive to these changes. Understanding how to leverage this adaptability can benefit from exploring the different types of pillar pages, each tailored to exact content goals and audience needs.
What Are The Different Types of Pillar Pages?
Pillar pages are a fundamental component of an effective content marketing and SEO strategy, serving as comprehensive guides that link to more detailed sub-topic articles or “cluster content.” These pages are designed to provide a thorough understanding of a broad topic while also helping to improve site structure and search engine visibility. There are several different types of pillar pages, each suited to different strategic needs:
- 10x Content Pillar Page: This type of pillar page is crafted to be ten times better than any other content currently available on the same topic. It’s characterized by extreme depth, breadth, and quality, comprehensively covering all facets of a topic. The goal is to create a standout resource that attracts notable traffic, encourages backlinks, and establishes authoritative strength in its niche.
- Resource Pillar Page: A resource pillar page is a comprehensive hub for information and resources related to a precise topic. It includes internal and external links to articles, tools, guides, and more. The primary purpose is to provide value to the reader by curating the best resources in one accessible location, making it a valuable linkable asset that other sites will want to reference.
- Guide Pillar Page: Essentially a detailed guide, this pillar page thoroughly explores a topic and guides the reader through various related sub-topics. It’s structured to educate and provide actionable insights. These pages are often formatted as comprehensive tutorials or complete handbooks, making them ideal for topics requiring depth to elucidate.
- Product or Service Pillar Page: This format ties closely with a company’s products or services, providing detailed information regarding how those offerings relate to a broader topic or industry issue. It’s used primarily to educate potential customers on why a product or service is relevant to their needs and how it fits within the larger industry context.
- Comparison Pillar Page: These pages are designed to compare and contrast different products, services, or methods within a topic area. They provide a clear, unbiased comparison to help readers make informed decisions. These are particularly useful in industries where new technologies or methods are frequently introduced.
- FAQ Pillar Page: Focused on answering common questions regarding a particular topic, FAQ pillar pages aggregate the most frequently asked questions into a comprehensive resource. They aim to cover all aspects of a topic through a Q&A format, which can be particularly effective for SEO as it directly addresses common search queries.
Each type of pillar page to meet exact objectives within a content strategy, whether to educate, drive conversions, or enhance traffic through strategic SEO and high-quality content. This versatility underscores the critical role pillar pages play in a comprehensive digital marketing approach, leading us to consider their overall significance on how important are pillar pages. This invites a deeper exploration of their impact on achieving lasting digital presence and authority.
Are Pillar Pages Really That Important?
The Content Marketing Institute reports that content has become more important year by year for almost 75% of all online businesses, and that is not even counting the non-business sites that have to fight for each blog post that they want to get ranked on search engines.
A pillar page is the next evolution in how sites structure their content: not just focusing on the desired outcome of more traffic but also the hard fact that something like pillar pages can be much more valuable to users than a typical blog post.
Good pillar content requires a lot more focus on appealing to search engines, as well as much more in-depth keyword research and general Google search data. Google Analytics can provide some actionable insights into how a pillar should be formed, but you are still taking risks.
Is that risk worth it? As far as we have seen with most businesses that have created at least one pillar post, absolutely.
A good pillar post provides user engagement, search and referral traffic, backlinking, higher authority, and constant relevance. These are all things that digital marketing is built around, and a content pillar can be far stronger than a simple guest post or attempt at Instagram marketing.
While pillars may not be the ideal solution to every single gap in your marketing, they provide unparalleled control over how you are ranking for search engines. Beyond that, they are an inherently useful piece of content that can be to suit your exact audience.
Is It Necessary to Hire Someone for Your Pillar Content Strategy?
Whether to hire someone for your pillar content strategy hinges on several key factors, including expertise, time, and strategic goals. Pillar content, the cornerstone of your SEO and content marketing efforts, demands a deep understanding of your audience, comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter, and proficiency in SEO practices.
Expertise and Time
You might manage without additional hires if your team already possesses the requisite expertise in content creation, SEO, and analytics. However, crafting pillar content that stands out requires important investment in research, writing, and optimization. If your current team is stretched thin, consider the potential benefits of hiring a specialist. They can ensure your pillar content truly resonates with your audience and achieves desired SEO outcomes, potentially boosting your content’s performance and your team’s productivity.
Strategic Goals
Your strategic goals are not just a part of this decision, they are the driving force. If establishing thought leadership and authority in your niche is a priority, bringing in an expert with a track record of producing high-quality, impactful content might be indispensable. This is especially true in highly competitive sectors where the quality of content can set you apart, and your strategic goals can be the key to your success.
Whether hiring for your pillar content strategy is necessary depends on your team’s capacity, the complexity of your topic areas, and your strategic ambitions. A dedicated professional can bring a focused approach to your pillar content, ensuring it is rich in quality, optimized for search, and aligned with your broader marketing objectives. Finally, investing in the right company could be the catalyst that propels your content strategy to new heights.
Why Should You Choose Searcharoo for Your Pillar Content Needs?
When it comes to building a robust content strategy that boosts your website’s visibility and authority, choosing the right tools and services is important. Searcharoo stands out as a premier choice for managing your pillar content needs for several compelling reasons:
- Comprehensive Topic Coverage: Searcharoo offers tools that help you explore and define broad topics comprehensively. This ensures that your pillar pages not only cover all necessary subtopics but also connect seamlessly with relevant cluster content, enhancing your site’s structure.
- Advanced SEO Tools: With Searcharoo, you benefit from advanced SEO tools designed to optimize your pillar content for search engines. These tools help identify the right keywords, analyze competition, and ensure that your content ranks well for targeted search terms.
- User-Friendly Interface: Whether you’re a seasoned content creator or new to the field, Searcharoo’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to manage your content. From drafting and editing to publishing and tracking performance, every step is streamlined for your convenience.
- Content Performance Analytics: Understanding how your content performs is key to refining your strategy. Searcharoo provides detailed analytics that measure engagement, traffic, and conversion metrics, allowing you to see what works and what needs adjustment.
- Expert Support and Guidance: Searcharoo isn’t just regarding software; it’s also concerning people. You’ll have access to a team of content strategy experts who can offer personalized advice and insights, helping you to craft pillar content that truly resonates with your audience.
- Scalability: As your business grows, your content needs will evolve. Searcharoo is designed to scale with you, supporting an increasing volume of content and more complex content strategies without sacrificing performance.
- Integration Capabilities: Easily integrate Searcharoo with other tools and platforms you’re already using. This ensures a smooth workflow and lets you leverage your existing investments in digital marketing and content management.
Choosing Searcharoo for your pillar content needs means not just selecting a tool, but partnering with a platform that grows with you, ensuring your content strategy is dynamic, searchable, and successful. Whether you’re looking to establish thought leadership, enhance SEO, or engage a broader audience, Searcharoo has the capabilities to make it happen.
The Takeaway: Mastering SEO and Content with Pillar Pages
Pillar pages are not just an enhancement to your content strategy; they are a critical element for achieving sustained online success. These comprehensive pages not only serve to boost SEO but also provide a substantial resource for your audience, enhancing user engagement and establishing your site as an authority in your field. Whether for driving traffic, enhancing brand visibility, or educating your audience, the value of investing in high-quality pillar content cannot be overstated. As the strategic importance of pillar pages continues to grow, making them indispensable in a competitive online environment.
