There’s a reason why Pillar/cornerstone content is one of the most popular content strategy trends of the past few years — it’s got the massive potential to boost your website’s relevance and trustworthiness.
Think about it — most websites give a fraction of their content a high-level overview and focus on the most important details and features. With a cornerstone content strategy, you take the most important information from your other content and highlight it in a way that provides a fast overview and explains key features in detail.
It’s a win-win-win — your visitors can quickly learn the most important information from your other content, your search engine rating increases, and you save time in the future when creating new content.
Pillar content can be defined as high-value content that is relevant to your business and that is linked to your website. It has the potential to attract links from diverse sources and can be used as a marketing tool.
There are many ways in which you can increase the value of your pillar content. Some of these include being creative with your topics, writing more often, and using more images in posts.
However, many SEOs struggle to understand how and when to use pillar content as a link-building strategy. That’s why you’re reading this article. In this article, we’ll give you a quick rundown on pillar content, its benefits, and common mistakes to avoid. If you’re ready to start implementing pillar content in your link profile, keep reading.
What is Pillar Content?
It’s the information you see on the front door, on a poster when you visit an online shop, the local train station, a hotel, a restaurant, or a school — the information that explains the product/service/school and helps visitors understand why they should choose that shop/school over others.
This information helps you make sense of your surroundings and allows you to efficiently complete your daily tasks.
For SEOs, Pillar content is a term used to describe high-quality evergreen content that is important for a website. This type of article or page can be seen as an essential building block for attracting links and improving your site’s overall SEO.
For example, if you run a dog magazine on the Internet, your Pillar Content might be about different breeds of dogs. A link to this page would then connect with all other pages focusing on dogs in general such as “How to Breed Dogs” and “Dog Breeds 101”.
Ideally, this content is relevant to your readers and is something that they’d be interested in reading. It’s generally focused on a single topic and benefits both your readers and your site’s SEO.
Recommended read: Different Kinds of SEO?
What Makes a Good Pillar/Cornerstone Content?
Cornerstone content is a piece of content that explains the core values of your business or describes the specific benefits of your product/service. It’s usually a short, high-level overview that quickly defines your business and allows your visitors to get a sense of who you are and what you do.
It’s the information you see on the front door of a hotel, or a business card — the information that gives visitors a quick idea of your identity, and helps them decide whether to stay away or choose your business.
Examples of cornerstone content
This is the easiest part. We’ve already compiled a list of examples of cornerstone content, so you can copy-paste and get your pillar/cornerstone content strategy up and running in no time.
– An overview of the product: “This isn’t an ordinary pressure washer — it’s a high-powered washer with a built-in pump, and a high-pressure nozzle that does an amazing job on your car’s body, windows, and tires.”
– High-level information about the product’s features: “Pressure washer: powerful enough to wash your car, windows, and tires without damaging the surface of the car.
Pump: pumps the pressure so you don’t have to stop and wait for the pressure to go down.
Nozzle: has high-pressure spray, so you can wash all the dirt and grime off your car’s surface without damaging it.”
– An overview of the product’s benefits: “It cleans the car without damaging it. It cleans the windows and tires without damaging them. It doesn’t leave a sooty film on the windows or tires. It saves you time and energy.”
– An FAQ on the product’s features: “What is the pressure of the nozzle? How do you clean the glass and windows? What about the wheels?”
Why Use Pillar Content?
Internal linking is the process of linking from one page to another on your site. By linking from one page to another, you tell Google that those pages are related to one another. Internal linking is essential for these reasons.
- It shows Google that your pages are related to one another. Google can tell that your articles are related to one another if they’re on the same site by reading the links between the pages.
- Pillar content makes it easier for users to find the information they are looking for on your site
- Pillar content help improve the overall SEO of your site by providing a central focus of your content.
- It helps to target specific keywords and phrases you want to rank for in search engine result pages.
- It helps to drive quality traffic to your website by choosing popular keywords and phrases to rank for.
- Pillar pages improve lead generation.
- It keeps your website content organized and easy to navigate.
Optimizing Your Cornerstone/Pillar Content
– Add links to your other posts/guides: This is a no-brainer that you should be doing anyway. By linking to your FAQs, reviews, and other guides/posts, you help direct your visitors to the most important parts of your site and make following your posts a whole lot easier.
– Use headers, images, and other call-to-action (CTA) elements: Add important information to your header, image, or CTA buttons. These elements are usually scrolled further down the page, so adding them to the top of your body (or above the fold) ensures your visitors see your key information. This also helps your content feel more structured and guide-like.
– Make your posts concise and to the point: Our cornerstone content posts are usually between 1000 and 5000 words, as they’re extremely concise and to-the-point. By making your posts as short as possible, and focusing on highlighting the most important information from your other content, you can make your posts as short as possible.
– Use visual content in your posts: While the text in your posts is extremely important, don’t forget about images that add a lot of value to your posts, and can help highlight key information and benefits from your other posts in a very visual way.
Different Types of Pillar Content
Internal links are great for building outbound links when coupled with inbound content. However, you can also use pillar content to build links internally. Let’s take a look at some examples.
FAQ: FAQs are the perfect type of internal link you can use to build links. They’re extremely informative, they’re shared often, and they’re relevant to your readers. Plus, they’re generally short and easy to produce.
Blogs: Blogs are another great type of internal link. They’re a great way to give readers a place to share their thoughts on a particular topic. Additionally, they’re an excellent way to highlight your site’s expertise. If you have a blog on your site, you can add internal links to let Google know that the blog is a part of the site.
Downloadable Guides: Guides are another great type of internal link you can use to build links. They’re generally lengthy and in-depth, which makes them ideal for internal linking. Plus, most guide formats are also easy to share and embed.
Images: Images are another great type of internal link. They’re generally large, easy to embed, and can be shared or pinned. That means you don’t even have to create the image from scratch. In fact, you can often find images on sites like Unsplash, Pixabay, and Creative Commons.
Key Questions to Ask Before Using Pillar Content
-Do the content you’re planning on using as pillar content fit your site’s topic and audience?
-If not, will you change the content so that it does?
-If so, what steps do you need to take to make this change? – Do you have the space and resources to produce the type of internal link you’re considering?
– Is the content you’re considering external or internal, and how will you decide?
How to Use Pillar Content
Creating and publishing pillar content is the easy part, especially if you have an editorial team in place. However, it’s important to understand how to use pillar content once you’ve published it.
Here, let’s take a quick look at how to use pillar content as a link building strategy:
– Pick one topic – You’re going to cover a lot of topics on your site, but you should pick one as your pillar topic. This is going to be the main topic of your content and the focus of your efforts.
– Create the main article
– Once you’ve picked a pillar topic, it’s time to create your main article. This is the article that will serve as your pillar content. It needs to be the most in-depth and lengthy article on your site.
– Add internal links – Once you’ve created your main article, add internal links to your pillar content. It’s important to note that you should use the same anchor text that you’re using for your off-site links. That way, Google knows that the link on your pillar content is pointing back to your main article.
– Publish and promote – Once you’ve published your pillar content, promote it just like you would promote any other article on your site. That means adding your internal links and including your article in the main content section of your site. You should also share your pillar content on social media, add a call-to-action, and send subscribers to your article so that they have a chance to read it.
– Rinse and repeat: That’s it! This is the easy part and should take you less than a week from start to finish. You should repeat this process once every four to six weeks to keep your link profile strong and healthy over the long term.
Conclusion
Pillar content is a marketing tool that is usually used by companies to describe their product or service in detail. It can also be used to promote a new product or service. The goal of pillar content is to provide the reader with everything they need to know about the company’s products, services, and culture.
Pillar content is not just informative, it’s also persuasive because it tells the reader why they should buy from you instead of your competitors. Pillar content should answer questions like “What makes your company different?”, “Why should I buy from you?” and “What are the benefits of buying from you?”.
The benefits of using pillar content as a marketing tool are that it’s informative and persuasive and it provides readers with all the information they need about your
