What Is A Pillar Content? Why It Matters For Your SEO Strategy
“Understood” is a strong word. It can be challenging to stay on top of the best practices for optimizing your blog to rank on the first page of SERPs because search engine algorithms are changing so quickly. However, this change is significant, so hold onto your keyword for this one. But, what is pillar content?
As the name itself indicates, pillar content acts as a pillar of your blog. Your blog might become unstable if there aren’t two or more Pillar posts. All by itself, pillar content has the power to attract a ton of traffic and backlinks.
The evolution of search, how pillar content factors into the picture are all covered in this blog post, and information on topic clusters.
Table of Contents
How Does Pillar Content Work?
SEO professionals refer to important content for a website as “pillar content” when referring to it’s high-quality, evergreen nature. It is typically a long-form piece of content that can be used to draw links and raise the site’s overall SEO.
A page or article that connects all of your other articles together is referred to as “pillar content” or “cornerstone content.” It includes your website’s most significant articles as well as the pages and posts you want to rank for in the search engines.
A piece about the various dog breeds, for instance, might serve as your Pillar Content if you run a website about dogs. This article would then link to all of your other articles about dogs, such as “How to Train a Dog” and “How to Choose the Right Dog for You”.
The Importance Of Pillar Pages
Here are a few reasons why Pillar pages are so important:
- By serving as the focal point for all of your other content, they assist in enhancing the site’s overall SEO.
- They draw links from other websites, which raises your website’s authority and ranking.
- The structure and usability of your website’s content are maintained by pillar pages.
- Targeting particular words and phrases that you want to rank for in search engines is possible with it.
- By appearing in search results for popular keywords and phrases, pillar pages can help your website receive more visitors.
- They are a fantastic way to demonstrate your knowledge and skill on a particular subject.
- Pillar pages are ideally suited for lead generation.
- Providing what users are looking for on the pillar page aids in lowering the bounce rate.
- The pillar page aids in enhancing the website’s architecture.
- It makes it simpler for search engines to choose and show the best URL in search results for a specific keyword.
- And more…
Benefits Of Pillar Content
Benefits of pillar content are:
- increases the time spent on a page because pillar posts are lengthy and insightful.
- reduces bounce rate in the case of round-up posts, and lengthy posts have a chance of having a large number of internal links.
- receives a lot of backlinks.
- receives an enormous number of shares.
- Throughout the existence of your blog, pillar content receives respectable traffic.
- Due to the substantial amount of words, shares, and backlinks, you will rank highly in Google.
- As pillar posts are regularly updated with better content, Google rankings rise because Google loves new, updated content.
And much more…
Ways To Find Pillar Content Ideas
I have already covered in detail on how to find blog topic ideas. But you must be very careful when writing pillar content about the subject matter you are writing about. Writing pillar content obviously takes more time than normal.
Therefore, you should make sure that some people will be there to read the pillar content that you will publish!
This means that before publishing foundational content. Ask yourself, “What’s the hot topic in my niche, who am I writing for?”.
Create content in a way that will benefit as many of your audience as possible.
Select a subject that has already attracted interest in your niche. Create content on the subject that goes beyond anything already written about it.
Ways To Create A Pillar Page
The first step to creating a pillar page is to stop thinking about your site in terms of just keywords. Start thinking about the topics you want to rank for first — then, brainstorm blog topic ideas based on more specific keywords related to the broader topic.
Consider your primary audience personas’ top passions and difficulties to generate ideas for pillar page content. Pick a topic that is broad enough to inspire additional related blog posts that will act as cluster content, but not so broad that it prevents you from covering the whole subject on a single pillar page.
For example, in our case, “social media” was too broad of a topic, but “Instagram captions” would have been too narrow. “Instagram marketing” is broad enough that we’re able to link many more blog posts that dive into In-depth information about Instagram that is still specific enough for us to write an in-depth pillar page about it.
When a searcher types in a Google search term that your page ranks for, they should be able to find all the answers on your pillar page, which will encourage them to click on it. After that, they will click into your pillar page to find the answers to their queries, which will then hyperlink to additional, more detailed pieces of cluster content.
Ways To Promote Your Pillar Content
It’s critical to show readers your effort while promoting your pillar content.
Here are some key tips on promoting pillar content:
- While sharing pillar content on social media, mention the word count of blog post. It raises the likelihood of retweets, sharing, or likes.
Like: Do check my latest post on WordPress security [it’s 2000+ words] - Use words like complete, ultimate, the only guide. The click through rate rises as a result.
- As you are all aware, the homepage determines whether PageRank applies to other blog posts. So, it’s important to link to your pillar post from your homepage, it increases visibility traffic and search engine rankings.
- Do share in all the blog communities. It’s well-liked by the blogging community, and there are more opportunities for a blog post to go viral.
- Do share the link to your pillar content to the forums; use it as your signature. The post draws more traffic because it contains detailed information.
- Create separate domains for your pillar content 301 To the main support post, reroute it.
- Link out to authoritative bloggers in your niche and tweet them about your outstanding content.
Offer your subscribers and readers your pillar posts in PDF format by packing them.
You can later repack them into EBooks.
How Can Pillar Content Be Kept Up To Date?
Since pillar posts never bury themselves beneath your blog, proper maintenance is necessary. They should be perennial.
All of your pillar posts need to be reviewed frequently to make sure they are current.
Make sure it is completely updated. To improve it, you must ruthlessly edit it. because they serve as the foundation for your blog.
Regular blog post updates also aid in improving Google rankings. In order for Google to recognize the content as being updated, make sure the updated date is clearly visible in the byline.
As pillar content is frequently updated, always try to interlink your pillar content in other blog posts. Your pillar content receives some link juice in this way.
See more about What Is A Pillar Page? Pillar Pages Help SEO
Topic Clusters: What Are They?
The way people search has changed, and as a result, SEOs and bloggers are starting to create content differently. Here is a basic overview; for more information, read our most recent research and blog posts on the development of search.
Longer And More Conversational Search Terms Are Being Entered By Users
Before starting a Google search, visualize yourself. If you were trying to find a place to eat sushi, would you search for “restaurants,” or would you search for “Japanese restaurants near me”?
If you choose option two, you’re in the majority: 64% of searches are four words or longer, and we’re noticing an increase in these longer-form conversational search queries that aid users in finding the precise information they’re looking for.
Voice search’s popularity has played a role in this, in part. Due to the popularity of Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, voice searches now account for 20% of mobile Google searches between Siri and Google Assistant, and this number is only expected to increase.
However, people aren’t just entering longer queries because of voice search. There is a lot of content available, and quantity far outweighs quality, to start. More specific queries are being submitted by users in order to quickly sort through the clutter and find the information they need. People are also reading articles more quickly and frequently relying on blog post headers or Google’s featured content to find quick, straightforward answers to their queries.
Additionally, search engines are getting better at sifting through the vast amount of content to deliver the best, most precise results. More on that next.
Search Engines Perform Better At Delivering Precisely What Users Are Looking For
In order to give searchers the most relevant results, Google’s algorithm is constantly being improved. Some of these adjustments include penalizing excessively pointless internal links, treating conversational queries as complete thoughts rather than a list of keywords, and utilizing machine learning to provide more precise definitions of particular terms.
All of this means that, even if the results aren’t exactly what the searcher was looking for, Google is still assisting users in finding the most accurate information possible. For example, if you searched for “running shoes,” Google will now also serve you up results for “sneakers.” This calls for bloggers and SEOs to become even more adept at producing and organizing content that fills in any gaps that might make it difficult for a searcher to find the information they seek on your website.
Your website must now be set up with blog posts about specialized, conversational long-tail keywords hyperlinked to one another, in order to respond to as many searches as possible about a given topic. The topic cluster model is now in play.
To Help More Pages Rank And Provide Better Results For Searchers, Use Topic Clusters
Due to the current design of most blogs (including our own, up until very recently), bloggers and SEOs have worked to produce individual blog posts that rank for particular keywords. The end result is disorganized, making it challenging for the user to locate the precise data they require. When you write multiple blog posts about the same subject, it also causes your own URLs to compete with one another in search engine rankings.
FAQs
Why Do I Need Suggestions For Links?
It can be challenging to recall or gather the posts or articles that you and your team have previously written. Without having to look up the necessary posts or URLs, link suggestions can help you complete your work more quickly.
How Can Rank Math Be Useful?
Users no longer need to manually search for and choose pertinent links to use inside the content thanks to our internal link suggestions. Based on the marked pillar links, chosen categories, and post-specific tags, Rank Math’s link suggestions handpick pertinent links for the article.
Why Are There No Link Suggestions Visible To Me?
Based on the articles or pages that have been designated as pillar content, Rank Math suggests links. You won’t be able to receive any recommendations if none of the pages or posts are designated as pillar content or marked in accordance with content that belongs to the same categories (blogs/articles).
Final Words
We trust this article has given you a better understanding of the value of pillar content and the Rank Math feature that allows for internal linking. Please feel free to contact our customer service team directly from this page if you have any further questions; we are always happy to assist.
I appreciate your reading.