Why Pillar Pages Should Have A Place In Your Content Strategy

In today’s digital landscape, search engine optimization is all about creating a website that provides your target audience with all the resources they need to navigate the buyer’s journey. Doing this effectively requires predicting what they want to know and compiling all that information in one place.

If you repeat this process for all your products and services, your customers will eventually turn to you for all their questions and never have to look far for answers again. Achieving this involves including a pillar content strategy into your SEO that, if done right, will get more traffic to your website while simultaneously positioning your brand as an industry expert.

Without further ado, read on to learn the whys and merits of adding pillar pages to your digital marketing strategy.

Understanding Pillar Pages

A pillar page, also known as the hub and spoke model, is a central piece of content covering a broad topic in one place (the hub), weaving together an extensive range of related subtopics (the spokes). In other words, it serves as the foundation for a topic cluster, i.e., a collection of blog posts within a topic that lets readers fully understand a given subject. These pages essentially showcase that a brand is a subject matter expert for the said broad topic.

Pillar page content must be simple to navigate for readers looking for answers about a certain topic while also providing other relevant resources for them to explore should they want to dive deeper. Think of it as content marketing with a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ theme.

Why You Need Both Pillar Pages and Blog Posts

While it may seem like pillar pages are much more beneficial to your content strategy than regular blog posts, you cannot have one without the other. Rather, an organized and well-executed pillar page is among the best ways to showcase your brand’s topical authority over a specific subject to search engines and your target audience. Regular blog posts improve your topical authority by covering many different yet related subtopics in great detail. At the same time, pillar pages organize all the content from your blog posts into a single and all-encompassing user-friendly package.

How Pillar Pages Improve Your SEO

1. Polish website structure

The pillar page/topic cluster strategy is a technical SEO optimization method as it improves a website’s structure and makes it easier for Googlebot to crawl through. The easier a website is to crawl by Google and other search engines, the easier it will be to discover, index, and rank its pages. To achieve this, a good rule of thumb is to have all pages on your website be accessible within no more than three clicks, starting from the homepage.

Furthermore, make sure that the most important pages are closest to the home page in your site’s information architecture. Pillar pages follow this model since they are designed to be a destination of their own, which means they are typically accessible directly from the homepage or can be found just a tier below.

2. Enhance your user’s experience

Pillar pages also help make websites easier to navigate by real users in search of information about a specific subject. After all, it only makes sense to group together the many related blog posts or pages categorized under one umbrella term. Thus, whenever a user enters a search query about how to do this or that, they can conveniently find everything they want to know in one place. This improved user experience keeps visitors on your site much longer, which the Google algorithm can pick up on and rank you higher.

3. Rank for competitive keywords

As hub pages for a certain main topic, pillar pages are meant to target broad keywords highly competitive on search engine result pages. Ranking for broad keywords generally requires making long-form content that extensively covers those keywords and linking to other pages that do the same for its child keywords—a.k.a pillar pages. Once these pages rank, they gain backlinks, traffic, and SEO power.

Conclusion

With all that said, using pillar pages is a great tactic if you already have existing blog posts focusing on a specific parent topic. This strategy also lets you re-purpose and re-promote your more dated content. However, that does not mean you cannot create a pillar page with all new content. Doing so will just be less intuitive and requires more time to do research, planning, and production. In these cases, it may be better to enlist the help of SEO services in the Philippines to streamline the process.