We've been helping clients move to pillar pages to boost SEO rank for the core services they offer and problems they solve. Better SEO is one of the biggest reasons people are interested in pillar pages, that’s why we created a pillar page on how to do it. But as we've helped more clients do this, we've seen many more benefits of this strategy.
In this article, I'll explain the benefits of implementing a pillar page content strategy that goes beyond boosting SEO.
Improved SEO
As I said, the main reason to adopt a topic cluster and pillar page strategy is to improve SEO for the things your brand does. Here are some examples of pillar page implementations that have yielded strong results:
The brand Bob Phibbs the Retail Doctor created a retail sales training pillar page. A Google search for ‘retail sales training’ shows their results:
Text from their pillar page is the featured snippet, and links to their pillar page make up the top four organic search results!
In addition to the SEO boost, your brand will see other benefits.
Improved Content Quality
A pillar page strategy tends to improve the quality of content because of the thorough planning that goes into creating the topic and subtopic pillar. To cover a topic thoroughly you have to perform gap analysis, then create any content needed to fill the gaps. This gives you a more comprehensive battery of content. It also makes it easier to make sure core messages are aligned throughout the content.
Since it's a campaign, and since so much content is being created at once, it's easier to get internal subject matter experts to review content, and make sure quality controls such as copy editing take place. While this should always be the case, some organizations struggle with these content development issues. For some organizations, doing all the content at once in a focused effort helps make those critical quality control steps happen.
Provides a Content Roadmap for your Team
Beyond the core content covered on the pillar page, you will likely come up with a series of related topics that dive more deeply into specific subtopics or related topics. This provides a roadmap for your content team. Content for these topics can be created later and linked to the pillar page or even added to the page and content offer if so desired. These follow-on articles can help you keep your pillar page topics top of mind for your audience longer.
Faster Content Creation
While mileage may vary, we have seen faster content creation results when working on topic clusters and pillar pages from scratch. The singular focus and shared research that goes into writing comprehensively on a single topic often makes it easier to create individual pieces of content. We’re been able to produce a content offer, pillar page, and 15-20 high-quality posts in four to six weeks. That content can be promoted over eight to 12-18 weeks.
Allows 'Content Binging'
By publishing a comprehensive battery of content all at once, you’re allowing members of your online community to binge your content. This is similar to binge-watching a Netflix series, but it’s not for entertainment. When someone is interested in a topic, they tend to consume as much content as possible on the subject. They want all of their questions answered. By creating a comprehensive pillar page, you’re allowing them to do that with your content, on your site!
Easier Communication and Reporting
We’ve found pillar pages make content campaigns, their goals, and objectives easier to explain to everyone. From the perspective of an agency, we find it easier to explain it to clients. Marketing managers find it easier to explain to their executive management.
The conversation goes something like this:
“We’re going to create a comprehensive page that explains this core topic. This topic maps to a key issue in the (awareness or decision stage) for buyer persona X. We’re going to leverage the pillar page content to create 15-20 individual pieces of content which will link back to the pillar page. This will give us a strong and persistent SEO boost, provide many points of entry to people to find our pillar page while allowing visitors to binge the content we’ve created. We’re also going to offer the pillar page content as a download, which about 50% of visitors will opt-in for so they can read it and distribute it internally. We’re going to include other content offers as appropriate on the pillar page which should drive more conversions.”
From this point, the discussion tends to become about the 'nuts and bolts' of the project. How much existing content can leveraged, how much will need minor changes, how much will need significant rewrites, how much content must be created from scratch, and the time frame for completion. It’s a very common sense approach that’s easy to understand.
Consider Moving Content Campaigns to the Same Process
We've told many of our clients that run multiple content campaigns a year to start thinking about those campaigns in terms of pillar pages. Both to see if creating a pillar page is a good fit with business and campaign goals and to apply the pillar page process to creating campaign content to realize these additional benefits. This approach is something your brand should consider as well.
