Key Takeaways
- To become a great website, you need topical authority!
- For topical authority, you need to cover your key topics hollistically!
- To cover topics holistically, you need to implement pillar content pages in your content marketing strategy!
In the constantly evolving digital marketing world, pillar content pages have become a centrepiece of successful content marketing strategies.
However, do you know what the pillar content pages are and why they are vital for your content marketing?
In this article, we will higlight the significance of pillar content pages in content marketing strategy as well as their role in SEO and how to create an effective campaign for them.
What are Pillar Content Pages?
Pillar content pages, also referred to as cornerstone contents, are comprehensive materials that contain expert opinions pertaining to a specific subject matter.
Such pages serve as the basis for any given organisation’s plan on how it will promote its product or service offerings through online platforms.
These pages should have long-form articles that remain relevant and useful over time.
Characteristics of Pillar Content
Pillar content is usually lengthy, running into thousands of words.
It encompasses broad topic areas and utilises various types of media, like videos, images, & infographics, to improve user engagement.
Their materials consist of extensive research work with proper citations and headings, thereby making them easy to follow.
Evergreenness implies that they can still be valuable in the future without the need for major updates.
The Role of Evergreen Content
Evergreen materials maintain effectiveness over a time period and avoid becoming irrelevant after a short while due to changes taking place within an industry or market segment.
Unlike news articles or other trend-based contents, evergreen ones continue to attract traffic even after a long period since publication.
This kind of material provides consistent value, which means that your efforts spent on creating well-crafted pillar pages will pay off significantly in the long run. Thus giving you a long-term content marketing strategy!
Regularly updating evergreen posts increases their lifespan, hence helping them remain relevant for longer periods.
Differentiating Between Pillar Content and Regular Blog Posts
Ordinary blog posts can be about virtually anything, shallow or deep, while pillar content is always in-depth, covering one broad subject.
Regular contributions may be more timely and less comprehensive, whereas pillar contents serve as a single point of reference around which other related materials are organised.
This distinction assists in aligning your content marketing strategy, enhancing the user experience (UX), and increasing SEO performance.
Why are Pillar Content Pages important?
They are important because of the various benefits they bring to the table. The below-mentioned benefits make a strong case for pillar content pages.
Boosting SEO performance
One of the major purposes of having pillar content pages is that they greatly affect SEO performance.
For instance, search engines like Google have to choose between millions of websites on what to rank.
With this in mind, creating comprehensive pillars on specific topics would signal them that your website has valuable information about such subjects, making it easy for people who are interested to find you.
Enhancing Search Engine Rankings
High-quality pillar contents should address common questions that the majority of the audience has regarding a particular topic.
Interestingly enough, when a user reads these materials, he or she gets much-needed answers for their queries, thereby increasing the chances that the article will rank highly on the search engines.
Consequently, the authority of these pages rises as they receive backlinks from other trusted sources, further boosting their rankings on search engines.
Augmenting Organic Traffic
A more prominent search engine listing increases organic traffic.
Whenever the user searches for information about your pillar content, your pages are more likely to appear in the top search results.
This not only increases the number of visits to your website but also attracts a more targeted audience which will engage with it and take action on your content.
Boosting a Keyword Strategy
Pillar content pages enable you to optimize for a wide range of keywords & phrases related to your main topic.
By incorporating these strategically placed keywords into your content, you boost its chances of appearing in various search engine queries.
This diversified keyword strategy enhances overall SEO performance by capturing more search traffic.
Boosting Internal Linking
Pillar content pages serve as the backbone of internal linking across a website.
One can learn about how websites are structured from internal links, which are the practice of linking one page within a website to another page on that same site.
When both inbound and outbound links come from or go towards pillar content pages, it creates a tangled web of connected material, thus improving the overall SEO performance of your website and making it easier for users to navigate through.
Creating a Structured Web of Content
Internal linking helps create an ordered structure of easily crawlable and readable web contents for search engines.
This approach is beneficial not only for SEO but also improves the user experience (UX) since it facilitates ease in finding other relevant posts on a given blog or website.
The internal links need to be properly arranged so as to have good results on this site’s performance generally.
Fostering User Navigation
Efficient internal linking enhances user navigation by establishing clear paths leading them directly to associated materials linked through anchor texts in posts’ bodies, among other places on the blog or website used as references.
To ensure that users remain on a website and do not leave after viewing only one page, it is necessary to provide related information about other topics.
This kind of experience contributes significantly to conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Improving Page Authority
Internal links help distribute page authority throughout your site.
By linking to and from these pillar content pages, you are able to direct link equity towards them.
Distributing high-value pages with authority will eventually lead to better SEO performance for the entire site.
Becoming an Authority
Developing pillar content pages helps establish your brand as an industry leader.
When you provide detailed, useful information on a subject, it shows that you know what you are talking about and gives people confidence in trusting you.
Thus, user engagement can be higher with more shares on social media platforms, which leads to an increase in conversion rates.
Earning Trust from Your Audience
By providing high-quality pillar content and demonstrating your expertise & commitment to valuable information that they will find helpful, trust is gradually built among the audience, who will come back for further recommendations or updates from the same source.
Trust leads directly to conversions because this is where relationship marketing lies on a long-term basis with buyers.
Encouraging Social Shares
Content perceived as authoritative and valuable tends to be more shareable through various social media networks.
The number of individuals reached by such posts increases, thereby driving more traffic to websites and making brands more prominent.
The credibility provided by shared testimonies may convince other followers, like a user or even their friends, to follow the brand too.
Driving Higher Conversion Rates
Authoritative content that appeals to your audience can result in higher conversion rates.
If a brand is trusted by the users and they find the content very valuable, then they are more likely to perform some desired actions, like signing up for newsletters, downloading resources, or purchasing products.
This is why pillar content is an effective tool for meeting business objectives and makes a content marketing strategy, amazing!
How to Craft a Content Marketing Strategy with Pillar Content Pages?
Developing an effective content marketing strategy that leverages pillar content pages involves several key steps. The following step-by-step guide will help you get started:
Identify Core Topics
The first step in developing a top notch content marketing strategy is to identify the core topics that are most relevant to your audience and your business.
These are broad topics, which could be broken into subtopics for detailed examination.
For example, if you own a digital marketing agency, some of these core areas would include SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing strategy.
Analyzing Audience Interests
Understanding what interests your audience is crucial when identifying core topics.
Conduct surveys, analyze social media interactions, and review the feedback provided to gain insights into what topics resonate most with your audience.
By using this approach focused on our audience needs, we will ensure that our pillar content is aligned with their needs and interests.
Aligning with Business Goals
Your core topics should also align with your business goals.
Consider what topics could help you achieve these goals, like raising brand awareness, driving traffic, or increasing sales conversions.
To ensure the efficiency of all efforts, aligning the content marketing strategy with the business goals becomes paramount!
Evaluating Competitor Content
Analyze competitors’ content strategies so as to spot gaps and chances available.
Look at what primary areas they are covering and how well their contents are performing.
Through this competitive analysis, it’s possible to gain insights that can be useful in making one’s content unique from others already in the market.
Conduct Keyword Research
After identifying your core topics, the next step will be doing keyword research.
This involves finding the keywords & phrases that your target audience is searching for related to these topics.
You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to search for high-volume and low competition words that you can target with your content.
Identifying High-Volume Keywords
The focus should be on finding high-volume keywords that are relevant to your core topics.
These are some of the keywords that can drive significant traffic to a website.
However, ensure that the identified keywords are also relevant to your audience’s needs and search intent.
Finding Low-Competition Keywords
Low competition keywords may provide opportunities for easier ranking in searches.
They have lower search volumes, but they are easy to focus on and still bring valuable traffic.
A mixture of high volume as well as low-competition words will make one’s keyword strategy successful.
Analyzing Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords, which represent more specific phrases with lower search volumes, are very important when it comes to targeting niche audiences.
The conversion rates of such key words tend to be higher because they imply a greater level of specificity within their search intent.
Integrate long-tail keywords into the content so as to cater for a wide range of searches!
Creating Comprehensive Pillar Content
Another thing to do is create your pillar content pages using the main themes and keywords.
For instance, each of these should have comprehensive, in-depth contents in which you cover every core topic exhaustively.
The focus should be on how to easily keep audiences’ attention where possible, including videos, images, texts, and other media.
Finally, ensure that this is a well-structured piece with clear headings and subheadings that enable easy reading.
Structuring Your Content Appropriately
An effective structure is what your pillar content should have so that the target audience will get the access they deserve and find it interesting to read through.
To accomplish this, incorporate outstanding bullet points as well as numbered lists within your composition.
Incorporating Multimedia Elements
Other elements, like pictures, videos, charts, or embedded objects, can add value to your pillar content.
These visual or audio elements are important for attracting readers as they help in understanding the complex ideas presented in the content.
According to our best practices, multimedia supports different learning preferences, hence improving the overall attractiveness of your work.
Ensuring Content Quality
When you want to establish authority through quality content that attracts traffic, there are several factors you ought to consider:
– First, carry out extensive research.
– Second, use reliable sources.
– Thirdly ensure its accuracy and relevance.
– Finally, proofread and polish it up.
High-quality articles not only appeal but also encourage readers to participate by commenting or sharing them.
Develop Cluster Content
The shorter and more focused pieces are known as cluster contents, and they reinforce the pillar contents present on these pages based on their core themes.
Case in point: if your page was about SEO, some of your subtopics would include keyword research and article writing using internet marketing strategies for website promotion.
You can link any one of these with any relevant pillar page so as to build a real connected web of contents.
Identifying Subtopics
To analyze the subtopics that are relevant to your pillar content, you may use some keywords and what people want from such topics.
Knowing this will guide you to the most valuable information sources about a particular topic, yet it will not make your reading too broad.
Creating Focused Content
Ensure that each cluster post has its own focus and does not exceed its boundary from the core theme.
Secondly, your discussion should be clear and deep enough without much exaggeration in order to give readers value for their time spent on it.
The reason for this is that every piece of cluster content must be able to complement and reinforce the main theme.
Linking Back to Pillar Content
Always remember that by utilising internal links between various elements of your content, you can create a structured path back to any other pillar page.
This way, you enhance the user experience and promote more engagements by having an interconnected content network all over your blog site.
Optimize for SEO
Lastly, if you want to get great results out of these pillar articles, then concentrate on their search engine optimization.
For example, effective placement of target keywords within the text could result in a higher web ranking, while other techniques include mobile optimization and optimizing meta-titles, descriptions, and h1 tags, among others.
Also, pay attention when creating many connections between nodes in your network, which are represented by our pillar and cluster pages.
Strategy of Keywords’ Placement
Your target keywords must be used appropriately in the whole content, including headings, subheadings, and body text.
Do not overuse the key words; instead, let them flow naturally!
This is helpful for search engines, as they can know how important your context is to particular queries.
Optimization of Meta Titles and Descriptions
The meta titles and descriptions are very important since they are clicked on by people from the search engine results pages (SERP).
Make sure that these meta titles and descriptions are engaging and provide information to users.
Conclusion
Now you know how important pillar pages can be for your success and how important it is to add them in your content marketing strategy.
With pillar pages in your content marketing strategy, your website is bound to shine on top of the search results!
We, Wildnet Technologies, have been using this technique in our digital marketing services for 17 years. Via this, we have been able to cater to 2100+ clients and help them generate USD 196K organically!
If you would like to learn more,
> What is the event count in Google Analytics?
> How to grow your businesswith digital marketing?
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Connect with us now at info@wildnettechnologies.com and revitalise your content marketing strategy!
FAQs
FAQ 1. What’s the main purpose of pillar content?
Ans: It becomes an anchor for your content clustor, giving you the opportunity to cover any subject hollistically!
FAQ 2. What is a pillar content page?
Ans: A pillar content page acts as a cornerstone for a content cluster on a topic.
FAQ 3. What is content pillar importance for content marketing strategy?
Ans: With so many benefits, be it topical authority, SEO performance, and more, pillar pages are vital for a great content marketing strategy.
FAQ 4. What are the three pillars of content strategy?
Ans: The three pillars of a content marketing strategy are:
– Communication,
– Experience, and
– Operation.
FAQ 5. Why are pillar pages important?
Ans: Google search results only cater to those websites that have authority in their domain and industry. Building authority faster is possible only by implementing pillar pages in a content marketing strategy.
