How Content Architecture Shapes Effective Content Pillars and Engaging Content Topics

Content architecture and topic selection are the foundation of an impactful content strategy.

What you decide to talk about frames the conversation your brand has with the world. To connect with and engage the right people, you need to talk about subjects that are important and useful to them.

How you present your message - the way you structure and organise your content - determines if that message lands.

Considering topic in relation to content architecture forces you to go further in your thinking. You're no longer just coming up with content ideas to fill your content calendar. It makes you think about how things fit to together and how they will pan out.

As a content strategist, how do you deliver valuable, relevant content that builds trust, authority, and credibility? How do you ensure you're designing, organising, and managing content effectively to achieve your business objectives? And how to you make sure you're investing in the topics with the greatest value for both audience and brand?

To address these questions and more, you need to implement a more strategic approach to topic selection. Content marketers often depend on topic pillars and content calendars to organise their content. Whilst helpful, applying a Content Architecture approach can help you to be more strategic in how you plan and organise your content as well as providing stronger guidance for where to invest resources.

The Benefits of Content Architecture in Organising Topics

Applying architectural thinking to topic selection simplifies what can be an unwieldy process. With a more structured approach, you can avoid getting bogged down by the sheer volume of potential topics.

Jumping from topic to topic makes it difficult to establish any sort of brand authority. Presenting your audience with a disorganised mix of unrelated articles, product pages, and other content is overwhelming. It can confuse both users and search algorithms.

To achieve the greatest impact for your business and target audience, it's important to narrow your focus on the most relevant subjects. This allows you to allocate resources strategically, prioritise projects effectively, and maintain a consistent production schedule that delivers high-quality content.

Grouping related content by topic creates a more logical structure that is easier for both humans and search engines to navigate. This organisation is critical. Without it your core brand signals can be obscured by the noise you are producing.

Organising content by topic also helps you generate content in an achievable, efficient, and scalable way. Like an organised closet, topics allows you to see what you already have. They allow you to avoid duplicate content, address content gaps, and identify opportunities for new content development and repurposing.

In short, a strategic approach to both subject focus and content architecture creates a content program that is effective and sustainable.

Revisiting the Four Questions of Content Architecture

In the first piece in this series, we outlined the four main questions your content architecture needs to answer. Let’s look at each of them specifically in terms of topic.

1. Scope

Are you covering all the right topics?

Content architecture ensures you have the right scope of topics by building taxonomies and content models. Structure looks at both the breadth and depth of topics that are relevant to your customers, brand, stakeholders, and search engines.

Creating a content pillar and cluster strategy, for example, not only ensures your content is well-organised and easily navigable. It also helps you to establish authority on key topics and to target long-tail keywords more effectively.

The first step in developing an effective topical taxonomy is establishing:

• The topics you want your brand to be known for (i.e. your area of expertise.)

• The topics that are interesting, relevant, and essential for your target users.

Your core topics will be found where these two overlap. Core topics will then act as a pillar page. These then links to more detailed subtopics or supporting resources to form a content hub.

You can pull your team in to brainstorm what these pillars and spokes should be. However, a computational approach will be more reliable for finding the intersection between brand and customer needs.

Use digital tools for keyword research and keyword clustering. Find relevant themes with informational intent, ranking potential, and multiple sub-topics.

Be guided by search intent. Find longtail keywords that fit different stages of your customer journey. Focus on the sub-topics that will have the most impact on your business.

You can also use these tools to identify topics to avoid. By establishing the boundaries of what's in and out, you clearly convey your areas of expertise and the audiences you're addressing. Clear topic priorities, and a structured way of thinking and communicating about them, sets you apart from the competition. It creates a point of differentiation and a unique, relevant, identifiable experience.

For example, say you’re a financial services brand that has identified ‘debt management’ as one of your core topics. You can use this pillar to develop strategic content for your website that supports each phase of your customer journey.

• Awareness – High-level blogs answering common questions about managing debt.

• Research – Articles that dive into specific sub-topics and position your brand as a financial expert.

• Consideration – Though-leadership podcasts that introduce your brand’s POV about financial planning and debt management.

• Purchase – Sales materials, buying guides, and product pages that explain your brand’s solutions for debt management.

• Post-purchase – Drip content sharing ongoing ways to keep control of finances.

This is only an overview of content pillar strategy. If you’re interested in learning more, we suggest reading our blog post ‘Build A Strong Content Strategy With Pillars’.

2. Organisation and Structure

You can have content that covers every facet of your core topics. But if people can't find what they're looking for, it will all be useless.

So, how do you group topics in a way that creates an organised and logical user experience?

You can impose structure by grouping content through your navigation, perhaps according to specific campaigns, products, or services. You can also reinforce structure within individual assets by linking related content together through internal links (or contextual navigation).

When done well, these structures create an intuitive way for users to engage with your content. It provides a flexible system that doesn’t force users to navigate through a strict hierarchy of menus and sub-menus. It doesn't rely on them knowing a specific keyword to search for desired information.

Instead, you provide users with multiple paths to gain additional context and to explore related content of interest. This not only only helps users find the information they’re looking for, it also creates relationships between ideas and content.

From a back-end perspective, being organised helps your content team understand which topics are important to different audiences and segments. It helps you to tailor your content and experiences to make them more relevant and underpins personalisation. Furthermore, it helps you to revisit assets to ensure content remains relevant and accurate.

An organised topic structure that uses keywords also makes it easier for search engines to classify and understand your site. By combining topic organisation with techniques like SEO writing, you can please human and machine users alike. It helps with domain authority, improves search engine rankings, and increases organic traffic and potential leads.

Going back to our financial service example. Suppose you produce content looking at tax brackets, pension schemes, and the financial ramifications of inheritance law. Normally, these pieces might exist in different content pillars. However, you could group this material together to support a seasonal tax filing/payment campaign each January.

3. Navigation, Framing, and Sensemaking

The way content marketers frame a topic has a huge impact on how viewers make sense of an organisation, brand, product or service.

Does the way you present your core topics help people to make sense of those things?

Effective framing requires getting into the mindset of your audience. Both to understand the questions they have, but also to structure the conversation in a way that helps them.

It is all about communication. It's important for users to see where they are in the content hierarchy. They need to know how topics relate to each other, and how to take the next step.

By understanding user preferences and needs, you are better able to:

• Offer contextual information that makes topics easier to understand.

• Group related topics in a logical way that helps with discoverability, so users can navigate, explore, and self-educate with ease.

We call this sort of approach ‘sensemaking’.

You help your target audience to frame their situation by guiding them through the process of clarifying their purpose, pain points and objectives. You help them to reconcile complexity and conflicting information so they can build a strong foundation for understanding their needs.

This process ensures you frame content in a way that helps users make sense of both their questions and your company's ability/role in answering them.

By framing topics in an original way, you can open users up to alternative possibilities. This can help with the unique positioning of your brand. However, if you do something that goes against the grain you need to consider how to do so skillfully. A groundbreaking approach needs to make as much, or even more sense, than the prevailing one. How you organise your topic relationships should feel natural, even if it’s better than how others do it.

There’s a strong relationship between content architecture and information architecture in how they guide site navigation. Grouping content into topic hubs and using contextual navigation is one method for framing and adding context to a subject. But don't forget more subtle components of information architecture, such as structural site navigation and microcopy.

Small tweaks to these elements can make a huge difference in how users perceive something. For example, adding a brief explanation on your contact forms helps users to understand how you’ll use their information. Doing so helps frame your brand as a respectful partner that users can trust with their information. (Taking a more human-centred approach towards your information architecture also makes search engines happy.)

4. Investment

Do you know where to sink your investment for the greatest impact?

Taking an architectural view of your content experience helps you understand the value of topics and content assets to your business.

Choosing topics that drive results is important, but it's also essential to know where to allocate your resources for maximum impact. It helps you to identify when to dive deep to maximise your results. It also highlights when to skim the surface of topics where the pickings aren't as rich.

Effective management of pillars and content models can help you identify gaps in your content strategy. For instance, you can quickly determine if you have ample awareness phase content on Topic X. And no sales enablement content on the same subject!

A strong content architecture and focus on topic focuses content development on the types of content your business needs. And then allocate resources accordingly. This not only optimises content production but also ensures that your content strategy is aligned with your business objectives.

Understanding how different topics and content types fit together helps you to accurately assess content ROI. By tracking how people interact with your content hubs, you can categorise topics in an impact/value matrix.

You will have low-impact / low-value topics, such as viral TikTok trends. While strategically engaging with such topics can serve a purpose, they are not where you should focus your efforts. If you are dealing with a more restricted budget, you might decide not to invest in such content at all.

At the other end of the spectrum are the high-impact / high-value topics which rest at the heart of your content experience (i.e. your pillar topics).

You can use insight from analysing search data to assess what high-impact and high-value means to you. High impact might be determined by looking at the amount of traffic a topic can generate, whilst high-impact can be identified by analysing the search intent behind specific keywords or your own data on what topics tend to drive conversions.

To manage your investment, you might choose to provide a greater variety of in-depth content for high-impact and high-value elements in your content architecture, but only create one or two high-level articles for topics that need to be covered for the sake of completeness, but which don’t really drive much commercial value.

A clear structure will let you to do more with less. You can create relationships between channels to create an omnichannel experience. You can make the most of your resources by being able to quickly find, reuse, and repurpose assets.

Moreover, it streamlines content production, resulting in consistent content production at a lower cost. And when you're outsourcing content creation, you can provide talent with the information they need to create high-quality assets that support a next-level experience.

Making the Most of Your Content

A lot of thought and detail goes into developing a successful content strategy and a meaningful, engaging experience for your users.

It is helpful to think about your architecture through the lens of topic, so you build structures that reflect your brand’s core message. However, your content architecture will also inform and be influenced by other areas. Your job is to merge and blend these different perspectives to create a coherent content strategy.

We hope you will join us for the next article, where we will explore content architecture with a focus on experience. Get in touch if you would like to learn more about how we can help.