A content pillar is a long, exhaustive article or webpage focused on one specific topic or niche that you can repurpose and turn into many smaller pieces of content to fill other channels. A long-form blog post can be broken into social media posts, infographics, videos, emails, and social media updates to attract the audience through different channels.
Here’s how content pillars help your marketing plans:
- Improves SEO.
- Helps you with easy site navigation.
- It helps readers dig deeper into a topic that increases their dwell time and reduces bounce rate.
- Search engines reward pillar pages with a better ranking that is frequently updated.
- More clustering around the pillar content can increase your authority on a topic that Google recognizes and ranks better.
- Linking pillar pages with topic clusters passes link authority from one page to another, which helps you to better rank your content.
Benefits of Content Pillars
1. Time-On-Page
Users dig deeper into a topic while staying on your site. This increases their dwell time and reduces the bounce rate. A user finds your website through the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and lands on your content. When you have all the information that your user requires, they click and read further posts on your website.
A content pillar usually is a single piece of authoritative content around a niche that offers high-quality and relevant information. When users come to your site for only one piece of information, they probably want to hit the back button or navigate away from your site as soon as they get the answer to their query.
The amount of time website visitors spend on your website is the average time on the page. Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your webpage without taking any action. Average time on the page lets you get the amount of time the visitors actually spend on that web page before clicking a link to navigate to another webpage.
2. Generates Backlinks
Write content so that it is easy for the audience to follow and find solutions. Your business must solve people’s problems and convert them into leads. Google ranks higher the web pages when they have backlinks from sites with higher domain authority. Your link-building strategy must be to create links to your pillar page instead of linking to your homepage. Make sure to have internal linking in your posts before they are published. Optimize the pillar page to contain all the SEO elements.
3. Potential Shares on Social Media
Shares, likes, and comments are the most important metrics on social media, as they bring brand awareness and in turn generate revenue for the business. The long-form content can be broken down into smaller pieces content like bite-sized videos, infographics, and visual representations of data, such as statistics. Visual content is easy to consume so it gives a chance for readers to quickly glance through the content and share it with others.
4. Improve Google Ranking
Google appreciates organized content that is built around a keyword and has a proper linking strategy. With relevant keywords, it is easy for Google to index the pages and return them to users in SERP. Google finds your website worthy of trust and high rankings when you have a proper keyword, good content around it, and strong external and internal links.
5. Build Content
In a content marketing strategy, the method is to create one big piece of content from which smaller assets can be derived. Marketers find it easy to promote and distribute products without having to create unique content and publish it on various media platforms. The long post is the hub article, which can be repurposed into different separate posts efficiently. Thereby, you recreate the content that is promotional assets with less work and more content to establish your brand authority.
6. Relevant Content
Content marketing for business includes publishing five blogs per month with each blog explaining a smaller piece of your content pillar. Though each blog has its own topic and purpose, it has to be tied back to the big picture and accomplish your business goals. Since each blog is part of the main content, they are relevant to your business, content strategy, and other cluster content that come from pillar content.
7. Less Work
The content pillar covers all areas of a broad topic and then links to related pieces of cluster content that delve deeper into the sub-topic. The pillar content achieves the content strategy by linking all of the related blog posts back to the pillar. Pillar pages are normally around 4000 words long that talk about your products elaborately.
It covers key points, which are customized to be anchor text. When clicked, it takes the user to the cluster pages, where most of the detailing are done. They answer the user’s questions preemptively and the users are more likely to click on the links to more of your cluster pages.
It takes great effort to create pillar content but when you are done with that, your audience gets something that they find important and relevant. It leads to filling your funnel and achieving your marketing goals.
8. Consistency
Pillar content gives consistency to all your content, as it is a source document for blogs, social media posts, and all visual content that branch from it. The tone of the articles remains consistent throughout the content. In all content marketing channels, your content will revolve around the pillar content and it will be easy for you to link to your own articles. Internal links create a network of content and allow users to stay on your page for a longer time.
9. Streamline
The pillar topic must have 2-4 words and must be industry-specific, educational, and support your products or services. It is at the top of the funnel bringing awareness to your audience. Make a competitor analysis to find what exists in terms of quality content and related content.
- Identify 4 to 10 broad topics of relevance to your business.
- Around each of these topics, create a cluster of related longer tail topics.
- As you develop each subtopic into a distinct piece of web content (i.e., think blog post content), link back to the core topic.
10. Boost Authority
Plan the form and structure of your content pillar so that you can update over time and keep it evergreen. People love your content when it solves their pain points and such content makes a connection with your audience. When you have content around the pillar that you have identified and create clusters around it, Google recognizes you as a leader in your niche that boosts your authority.
11. Create a Healthy Digital Ecosystem
Having all your digital assets working towards a common goal of growing your business. You need data to build a business that works toward your business goals. The ecosystem must be a robust guide that your business should follow that helps you build your business’ digital framework. This framework must include market research strategies, competitor analysis, content creation, keyword research, website best practices, web security, lead generation, building an audience, reviews, and digital advertising.
FAQs
1. What is a content pillar?
A content pillar is a specific topic or theme upon which similar content pieces are built. Comprehensive Guides, ‘What is,’ and ‘How to’ are the three most common forms of content pillars.
2. Why are content pillars important?
Content pillars help you focus on a specific theme to create your content strategy and plan your content calendar. It enables you to streamline your content creation process by breaking down large pieces of content into similar sections to promote on all channels. Having a defined content pillar ensures consistency with the brand message on your social media channels. It also helps your audience to quickly find the content they are looking for under a specific pillar.
3. What is the main purpose of a content pillar?
The main reason to create a content pillar is to serve the audience or the reader to find everything related to the topic under the same roof.
4. How do pillar pages help websites rank well?
As pillar pages cover broad topics, they have a high probability of ranking for keywords. Also, Google favors the intent of websites, providing organized and quality content with a proper linking strategy to your pillar pages enables you to rank well on search engines.
5. How to promote pillar pages?
Using social media to promote your pillar pages lets you maintain authority over a niche, and can help you showcase yourself as a subject matter expert. Optimize these pillar pages and create content according to various social media channels. Also, you can repurpose the content into different forms and promote it in other channels to maximize distribution.
Closing Thoughts
A successful content marketing campaign requires good content that resonates with the right people. To identify and build pillar content focus on topics, rather than keywords. Implement SMART KPIs to strategically build valuable content around a central theme. Usually, pillar content is How-To, What-Is, and Guide type content.
Take time to research your pillar content as it drives traffic, engages your audience, and, generates revenue. Follow our blogs to learn more about content marketing, strategies, and tips.
