How strong pillars hold your content up
Let’s do a little exercise.
If we asked you to name five topics that you can comfortably speak on, what would they be? What do you want your business to be associated with?
For those in the business of content marketing, for example, topics can include blogging, content strategy and idea generation.
Of course, there are a myriad of others, but for the current purposes, it’s just about naming three to five topics that you absolutely, positively can authoritatively speak on.
Once you’ve jotted these down, congratulations, these are your content pillars.
Creating pillar pages
Here’s an important fact for you: blogs are among the primary three forms of media used in content strategies.
Another one? Web traffic is in the top two most-common measurements of success for content marketing strategies.
These two facts alone show the importance of content when it comes to any business, whether product or service based.
One particular content strategy that works for a number of businesses is focusing on topics, rather than keywords. This means creating a whole load of valuable content around one central theme, otherwise known as a ‘pillar’.
The pillar page is a comprehensive in-depth overview of the broad theme or topic, from which offshoots are created, all linking back to the original webpage. Think of it as the middle of the spider’s web - if you follow the web, no matter how intricate, everything eventually comes back to the centre.
Benefits of content pillars
While it may sound time-consuming to get content pillars off the ground (we’ll say it outright, that’s what we’re there for), there are actually a whole heap of benefits.
Navigation
If everything you need to know about a topic is all on the one single webpage, isn’t it much more convenient? Yeah, we think so too. But it’s not just your readers who find this more user-friendly, it’s also search engines who find it much easier to rifle through your content and rank it.
Linking is king
Generally, a high-performing pillar page can actually help the rankings of all the other pages. Remember that spider’s web we spoke about earlier?
If all pages on the same topic are linking back together, it’s much faster for Google to figure out what the individual pages are banging on about.
Everything makes sense and everything matches up. Help clear up some of the confusion Google sometimes feels.
Trust us, Google, and your business will thank you for it!
Keep the focus
There are few things worse than scattered content. Content pillars keep your focus on your expertise and keep your customers engaged by ensuring everything is in the one handy place.
Getting it done
There are three questions to ask when deciding what topics to cover as pillar pages.
Are enough people searching for that particular information?
Do you already have content covering the particular topic? If so, you can probably turn this into a pillar page and then double down on the nitty gritty elements.
Do you want to cover this topic in detail? Remember, pillar pages will have dozens of offshoot pages that will cover the topic in excruciating detail. If it’s not something that is relevant to your business and that you can cover as an expert, that’s not the topic to cover.
The most important thing whenever it comes to content, including pillars, is that you should be creating it for your audience.
Sure, Google looms in the back of everyone’s minds, but at the end of the day, if your content isn’t engaging or interesting for customers, there’s not going to be much reward now, is there?