Defining Content Pillars

Pillars are the themes or topics that are integral to communicating your company’s offer to your ideal audience. Your pillars are defined by

•      What you want your brand to be known for. What is your area of expertise? Which topics should your audience expect you to have the best tips and information about?

•       Who your audience is and what topics they need information on from you.

Where these two definitions overlap, you can determine three to five themes around which to build your content marketing strategy. Over time your audience will come to expect these topics from your content and turn to you as a trusted source of information. It helps to build recognition and authority for your brand, as well as helping to organise your content ideation and creation processes.

For a new business or one that's just started building their content marketing strategy, the next step is simple. If you have no current content, after defining your themes you can start to develop and schedule content that fits into those brackets.

If you’re working with an archive, a content audit will allow you to see where existing content fits into your new structure and what gaps you need to fill to produce a comprehensive overview. You may have current blog posts that you can easily link in. You might also have existing infographics or video content that supports your topic.

You should also take the opportunity to update old content where applicable. You don't want to link in a five-year-old article without making certain that it's accurate to current best practices. This is especially true if you're working in an industry that changes rapidly.

What Are The Benefits of Using Content Pillars?

Increase Your Page Ranking

A well-researched and optimised pillar page can increase your page ranking. The internal linking inherent in a pillar and cluster strategy naturally establishes a site structure that is friendly to search engine bots. Google and other search engines are looking for pages that give searchers great value, and they're scoring your site on how valuable the content is based on the search terms. Pillar pages also attract more sharing and linking from outside sources, which increases your credibility. This is a major win because you're looking at better organisation and essentially one page of very well-thought-out content reaping the kind of ROI that usually takes much longer to build.

Provide Real Value for Your Audience

Here's the real goal. Ranking well, generating traffic, and getting new conversions is a by-product of providing your prospects with a  valuable and enjoyable customer experience. All of your content marketing endeavours should have that core focus in common. Your goal is to give the customer what they need, solve their problems, and increase their loyalty. This is what pillar pages do really well by making it easy for them to find what they need in one easy to navigate comprehensive resource and why they should be a part of your content marketing strategy.

Organises Your Content (for you and your readers)

Organisation is a huge benefit here. It's one of the things that helps you rank in search engines but it also makes your website far more palatable and makes planning your content schedule far more straightforward. Readers can find everything they need and the whole process on your website is more user-friendly. They also get consistent content and messaging across all of your channels. This type of organisational strategy also benefits you. Organising in this way helps you to plan future content and to easily see which pieces work well to tweak your ongoing strategy.

Creating engaging content is the optimal goal, but the type of content that hits the mark with your audience keeps changing. Your content marketing strategy needs to reflect the changing needs of your customer and the types of content they find engaging while maintaining the integrity of your core message.

If you're creating or revising your content strategy, you also have to keep in mind that the customer journey is no longer the linear model that was used a few years ago. Your audience are not looking to be led by your content through the steps of your funnel. They want control of their experience.

The way you develop your content must be flexible enough to flow with the changes. It will allow you to add new techniques, build in more dynamic video content, change the way that you produce blog content or reinvent any of the communication points your content serves, because it's not a stagnant process. However, it also needs to provide the organisational structure your team needs to get the job done consistently, effectively and efficiently.

Using Content Pillars to Structure Your Website

A content marketing strategy built on these foundations allows you to organise your website by implementing pillar pages and topic clusters.

Pillar pages are longer pieces of content that give a great overview of one of your core topics. The pillar page also links to other content you create on the same theme or related sub-topics. While pillar content gives you a comprehensive overview, the supporting pieces are more narrowly focused or cover more specific elements about the subject.

Think of it in terms of the introductory chapter to a book where the aim is to give an overview that tells the reader why they should read on and signposts the topics that will be covered in more depth later.

The links included in the pillar page makes this a highly SEO friendly strategy. They also allow your reader to immediately get more in depth knowledge on aspects of the topic, as well as working in reverse. People find your supporting content from other channels, which leads them into your larger pillar page.

A pillar page is going to be a larger piece of content in terms of word count and needs to be well researched, both in terms of its content and SEO. Developing pillar pages can also require a heavier investment of resources as you might also want to develop supporting content to make the page highly authoritative, shareable and actionable. Consider including downloadable resources such as guides, checklists and eBooks, as well as infographics, custom images and video content.

Let's break this down as an example to make this a little more understandable.

Say you run a successful law firm and you specialise in estate planning. Your pillar page might be an overview of estate planning that links to clusters of posts going deeper into the specifics of elder law, trusts, wills, etc.

Your pillar page will be written as a guide designed to inform and educate your audience. You could market this page to a different segments of your readership, such as "A Handy Guide to Estate Planning as You Near Retirement" or "Why Estate Planning Is Crucial Even in the Early Stages of Your Career".

While the pillar page itself should bring organic traffic, you should also create content for your social media, email, and other channels that link back to that guide.

What Makes a Good Pillar Page?

We've talked about the fact that pillar pages aren't necessarily simple or easy to create. So what makes a good pillar page?

A good pillar page starts with your strategy. Your topic needs to be focused and you have to have a clear idea of your target audience. You need to have a goal in mind - what audience do you want to reach, what search terms they’re using when looking for your topic online, and what type of ROI you need to see.

Your page needs to be innovative, hit the right tone, and, ideally, solve a problem that offers an immediate payoff for your reader. Not only is the payoff immediate but your page can be the gift that keeps on giving because they can follow the links to new cluster information to flesh out more on the topic.

For this reason cornerstone pages, or pillar pages, are most often guides or listicles. But they focus on something of paramount importance to the target audience.

The pillar page doesn't necessarily need to be a page or guide on your own website. Think outside the box here. You can also use other platforms. For instance, LinkedIn Showcase pages might be suitable for some brands to use as a way of organising their content thematically, acting in effect as pillar pages.

Getting Started With Pillar Pages

The truth is that there is a lot of strategic planning and creativity that goes into executing a good pillar page and, as we’ve seen, they can require a heavy investment of resources. However, they are worth it.

All of this can seem daunting, especially if you’re starting out from zero and need to create the depth of cluster content required to support a pillar page. In this instance, remember that the pillar page itself doesn't need to be the first piece of content you produce. You can create a plan to develop and publish your cluster content over a number of months without having a pillar page anywhere, and then link it all together further down the line.

Step 1: Start by defining your topic.

What topics are your ideal audience interested in interested in? More pointedly, what area of your service offering would they want to purchase? For instance, if you were in the technology field and have found that your work in program development with start-ups is more lucrative than your programming contracts with enterprise customers, you'd want to prioritise developing a pillar page that's tailored to start-up owners and entrepreneurs.

Step 2: Do your keyword research.

You want to make sure that you're using keywords and phrases that are both being used by your audience and are relevant to your topic. Stuffing your content with irrelevant but highly ranking keywords will not only create a poor experience that your potential customers will reject, it will also be penalised by the search engines.

Step 3: Develop your headline and point of view

You might use a guide model or a listicle model, but the outcome is to develop good, actionable content for your audience. After that, assess which pieces of your current content can be linked in to provide a more comprehensive resource. And once you've done that, you can develop a schedule for developing future pieces of cluster content.

Step 4: Finally – Promote it!

Once you have produced a great pillar piece, you need to promote it. Blast it from all of your channels so that your current audience gets to read it and, hopefully share it.

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If pillar pages sound like a great addition to your current content strategy but you'd like help in bringing the perfect offering to life, contact us today.