Why pillar pages should be a key element of your content strategy

0
Feb 24, 2023 / by
Why pillar pages should be a key element of your content strategy

Creating a bold content strategy that elevates your worth and boosts your SEO should be a key concern for any business, regardless of size or stature. In putting together this strategy, however, you need a strong foundation if you’re going to create something truly expansive and scalable. That’s where your pillar pages come in.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is the main page from which dozens or even hundreds of other pages spread out. They contain a lot of general information that can then be expanded upon on other cluster pages. If product pages are the leaves of your tree and blog are the branches, pillar pages are the trunk from which everything else grows. They are an essential aspect of content creation but are often overlooked.

Pillar pages are the bones of your website structure and are vital in ensuring search engines see your site as a credible source. They are more than just glorified indexes too, as they are more likely to be indexed and ranked highly if they also contain relevant, authoritative and well-structured information with strong internal and external linking.

So often, those without a firm grasp of SEO will spend minimal time on their pillar pages, instead making them little more than a few paragraphs stuffed full of keywords and links. However, a great pillar page should be at least 3000 words and contain as much information as possible. Because it might not look like the final destination to you but it could look like the final destination for Google’s web crawler.

Incorporating pillar pages into your strategy

The good news is that if you already have a website with lots of quality content then a lot of the work has already been done. Pillar pages exist to highlight existing content, after all, and this can often be done by collecting together information from your cluster pages and choosing the snappiest content to use as a potential call to action to click for more information.

You might even find a blog post that could become a new pillar page with a little tweaking. Indeed, making pillar pages out of old content is a great way of rekindling interest in older posts.

Remember that pillar pages should focus on broad, top-of-funnel subjects that attract as wide an audience as possible. Think of short-tail keywords and topics that revolve around significant pain points; you can always add more specific cluster pages later but the pillar page needs to be as accessible as possible.

A pillar page is a high-level piece of content, and more marketers need to start treating them as such. They should be informative, broad, helpful and wide-ranging, without being padded out. It’s a difficult balance to strike, of course, but once you hit that sweet spot you’ll be adding as many pillar pages to your site as possible, trust us!

Tags: