High-performing Content pillars direct content creation to improve SEO by building authoritative, long-form focused on a certain key concept. A content marketer’s job is to have a flow of ideas for content creation and marketing.
You have to stick to your content strategy, and the most fundamental thing is to have frequent posts in all the marketing channels you have explored.
What do you do when you don’t have time to develop ideas spontaneously?
The answer is content pillars that help you focus on your content marketing strategy. This article offers tips on building high-performing content pillars that align with your business and content marketing strategy.
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- 4 Content Pillars for Social Media – A Complete Guide
- Content Marketing for Startups – A Complete Step-by-Step Guide
- 3 Content Pillars for Product-Based Businesses – The Ultimate Guide
What Is a High-Performing Content Pillar?
An essential part of the brand is building a content strategy that provides extensive information on a specific topic, giving readers all the information they need. The content pillar can be broken down into many clusters in the form of newsletters, guides, ebooks, and PDFs. You can turn a large blog post into chunks of smaller content that can be published on social media channels as small posts, emails, and infographics.
Pillar content pages provide considerable information about a topic, which makes it a hub page from where other topics around the pillar evolve. Pillar pages have ultimate guides, long reads, and PDFs. The aesthetics of the webpage is taken care of by the User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) designer to place the topics in such a way that it is appealing to the user and Google.
How to Create Pillar Content?
You must step out of the keyword mindset and consider the topics you want to rank for. Select the pillar topics and then choose blog topics for cluster content based on keywords related to your topic. Choose pillar topics in a manner that can accommodate enough cluster topics around them. Your content strategy will be more streamlined with a strong pillar page. The potential customers on your website are likelier to click on the links that take them to the cluster topics.
The pillar page can be an informational guide or a landing page that helps with lead generation. Now, your pillar page is the center of the content hub, where cluster pages are interlinked with the pillar. It can be broken down into small pieces and repurposed on social media channels, emails, or other marketing channels where you wish to market your business. With that being said, make sure that your pillar content is:
- Longer than a blog post.
- Detailed enough to provide information to the reader.
- Generalized enough to allow cluster content to elaborate on the content.
- Answer the questions users search for about your pillar content. This will increase the pillar page’s click-through rate.
Why Do You Need High-Performing Content Pillars?
Google wants to provide the most relevant content to its searchers. When the websites contain a lot of information, the web crawler finds it hard to determine which post is relevant and irrelevant to the websites. Google can’t rank your blog posts if it cannot sort out the content.
Pillar pages can bring clarity to the website. It will be hard for Google and other users if the posts are disjointed in structure. Pillar content creates a site structure that organizes and links several resources related to the same topic.
8 Tips to Build High-Performing Content Pillars
1. Understand Your Target
Identifying your target audience and understanding their pain points is essential to planning your content accordingly. Understand their wants and needs and analyze whether your business provides them with the best possible solution.
2. Project Your Strengths
You need to develop content that solves the customer’s pain points and is in accordance with your business. The content pillars must broadly cover the audience’s problems, and you can link them to your product as a solution to the audience’s problems.
3. Analyze Your Competitors
To develop a good content pillar, find out the topics your competitors are ranking. You should also check social media platforms for topics your audience discusses and shares. Ask your customers what problems they face and their preferences on the type of content they prefer.
4. Do Proper Keyword Research
Conduct keyword research and find the keywords that your audience is searching for. Confirm these keywords using keyword research tools, such as ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner. Based on that, build a topic repository, pillar content, and cluster content.
5. Streamline Content Strategy
The pillar content topics guide your content creation as you work on delivering different types of content related to the pillar’s theme. Content pillars guide your social media marketing as you can repurpose your pillar content into content for social media, such as Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
6. Optimize Your Pillar Page
This is the last step to tying everything together. Make sure to link all the cluster content that supports your pillar page content and include a link back to your pillar content in each individual content piece. For instance, include a link to the Home Page on all the web pages of your website.
An anchored table of contents is great for content pillars. Adding it to the top of the web page makes it easier for Google and the users to navigate smoothly. Include on-page SEO factors, such as:
- Include proper heading tags.
- Use the primary keyword generously without overstuffing.
- Give importance to the metadata and URL slug.
- Include Alt text to all GIFS and JPEGS.
7. Organize Your Subtopic
You need to form subtopics that form the cluster pages and build the structure for the pillar page. The pillar page you developed has touched upon all the subtopics you have created. After you complete the development of the cluster pages, you can link them all to the pillar page.
It is a good idea to start with cluster pages first, as you will have all the relevant links from the start that you can link to the pillar content. By doing so, you deliver the maximum value to the reader and prevent duplicate content on your website.
8. Audit the Existing Content on Your Website
At this stage, you can audit your website and search for content aligned with your pillar content. You can repurpose, modify, and further break down the content, including the latest updates to the existing content. For instance, you can link a video on your content marketing channel relevant to the pillar content.
FAQs
1. What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the strategy of creating and promoting different forms of content. Content marketing is an organic promotion strategy. Some forms of content marketing include blogs, videos, images, infographics, podcasts, emails, and newsletters.
2. What are high-performing content pillars?
A high-performing content pillar is a specific topic or theme upon which similar content pieces are built. It is a hub article that links all the other blogs on the website.
3. What are the benefits of content pillars?
– Helps the audience navigate to your content all under one roof.
– Improves your SEO and Google ranking.
– Generates backlinks.
– Enables consistency and improves brand presence.
4. Why are content pillars important?
Content pillars help you focus on a specific theme to plan your content calendar. They allow you to promote, educate and entertain your audience based on the product or service you offer. It helps you streamline your content creation process by breaking down large pieces of content into similar sections to promote in all channels.
Closing Thoughts
High-performing content pillars are an integral part of content marketing strategy that provides substantial information to the readers on a niche. Usually, it might be in the form of a long post that comprehensively explains a genre. When you identify a strong content pillar, you can start building many clusters of content around it.
Try to bring variety to your blog by having podcasts, videos, newsletters, reviews, infographics, and social media posts. It is an efficient and process-driven way to cover all the content needs to deliver the right content to the right customer at the right time. Read our blogs to learn more about content marketing, strategies, tools, and everything about content.
