07.1.2024 Osian Barnes
If you follow any leading content marketing blogs, you will have noticed ‘pillar pages’ or ‘pillar content’ is getting a lot of airtime lately. The phrase has been around a while, as long as 2013 (which in SEO terms is ancient) but has come to the forefront recently, it seems, by HubSpot adopting the approach, along with the concept of ‘topic clusters’.
What is a Pillar Page
If you’ve been doing inbound marketing for a while, you may wonder what the difference is between pillar content and cornerstone content. The good news is cornerstone content is virtually indistinguishable from Pillar content; they’re just branded differently.
As the name suggests, Pillar pages are architectural and involve structuring your website around key pages. Cornerstone content is foundational content from which the rest of your content should branch and link.
Before you can go about setting up your pillar pages, you first need to organise your content in topic clusters.
What are Topic Clusters
The concept of optimising your content around topics is in reaction to research showing that 64% of Google searches are now four words or more. Users are asking longer, more complex questions and expecting contextually accurate responses, dependent on their location and search history.
Google is forever changing their algorithms, but the two most notable updates in response to this change in user behaviour are Hummingbird and RankBrain.
Hummingbird, launched in 2013, meant Google could consider each word in a search query, ensuring that the whole question - the whole sentence or conversation or meaning - is taken into account, rather than particular keywords.
The next significant step toward reliance on topics occurred with Google’s RankBrain update, launched in 2015. RankBrain is Google’s machine learning algorithm designed to understand the context of people’s search queries based on past searches with similar themes. This pulls multiple keywords and phrases associated with the search query to find the best results.
How to organise your content in Topic Clusters
Your blog is probably structured as individual blog posts that rank for specific keywords, making it difficult for users to find the exact information they need. More than likely, you are competing with yourself in the search rankings for certain keywords.
To create topic clusters, HubSpot suggests that you take a step back and think about the broad topics you want to rank for, then either create new content based on specific keywords related to that topic that all link to each other or revisit your existing content and group your posts accordingly to create broader search engine authority.
Still confused? Take a look at this example of HubSpot’s page on Instagram Marketing.
- Topic: Instagram Marketing
- Pillar Content: Instagram Marketing
- Cluster Content
As you can see, each of these blog posts links back to the pillar page. This helps share domain authority, so all blog posts within a cluster start ranking for the specific keywords they're written for - which all work to help the entire topic cluster succeed in search engine results pages (SERPs).
How to create a Pillar Page
No hiding from the fact that reorganising your site infrastructure around topic clusters is a lot of work. And it is not something to be rushed. Start with one topic and one pillar page, and use it as a testing ground before reorganising your whole site.
Your first port of call should be your buyer personas. From your existing research or by conducting new research, you need to find out what they're searching for, which will, in turn, determine how broad to make your pillar page.
Pillar pages need to broadly cover the topic you’re focusing on to link all the relevant cluster content but still be specific enough to produce a comprehensive pillar page about it. HubSpot suggests around 20 related blogs are sufficient to create a topic cluster around the pillar content.
You may already have a page that makes sense to convert into a pillar page. For example, Equinet works in contract manufacturing, where we often find that 'Brand' is an afterthought in a world where our clients are expected to operate unseen. So creating a pillar page on brand positioning, why it matters and how to address it helps us get found by customers who recognise the problem.
With a pillar page, you need a definition of the topic or term you're covering somewhere in the first section, a table of contents, specific topic-related keywords in each of your subheadings, and content that provides an overview of the subtopics discussed on the pillar page.
Now you have your pillar page, you need to do some keyword research (yes - keywords are still relevant). Choose keywords with high search volume that cover different aspects of your chosen topic, and use those to create your page titles.
Finally, all you have to do is to continue blogging regularly around the specific keywords within your topic cluster. Make sure to link all future posts to your pillar page to create a streamlined reader experience and help your content rank higher in search engine results pages.
