When writing and creating content for your website, you want to structure it as effectively as possible so that readers can easily find what they’re looking for. Pillar pages help you organize your content and also have a positive impact on your SEO. By using them, you’re improving your website’s user-friendliness. This is important for visitors, but also for your search engine optimization.
An optimal user experience on a website ensures that the end user stays on your site longer, clicks through naturally, and absorbs more information. This increases the likelihood of achieving the ultimate goal: converting the visitor into a customer. Before you can achieve this, you need a solid internal linking structure. By setting up pillar pages, you can ensure clear navigation. This helps visitors find relevant content and navigate further to specific topics.
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A pillar page should be accessible from the homepage with just one click. They provide structure and navigation. It is therefore advisable to include a table of contents on such pages. This not only ensures that the website can be indexed more effectively but also helps it achieve better results in the SERP. The use of links and backlinks is also very important. This allows you to link to subpages, drawing visitors deeper into the website. This results in an optimized user experience. Search engines also value structure. For example, Google prefers websites with clear hyperlinks and logically linked content.
But a pillar page also demonstrates that you have extensive knowledge on a specific topic. In theory, pillar content is evergreen content—content that remains relevant indefinitely. By creating it, you’re building your website’s authority, which in turn can positively impact your backlink strategy and, consequently, your domain value. Search engines like Google also value the presence of pillar pages and are therefore more likely to recognize you as an expert in the field. This is closely tied to the Google E-A-T update, which Google uses to assess your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
As a marketer, you want to create high-quality content and make it as accessible as possible. The goal is for search engines to recognize this content as valuable and reliable. Pillar pages consist of what’s known as evergreen content. This is content that doesn’t become outdated, since it covers topics that remain relevant. Think, for example, of a pillar page with content about “10 Tips for the Best Apple Pie.” Make sure to keep evergreen content up to date. According to a study by Neil Patel, conducted in response to the Google Core updates, websites that regularly update their content saw an increase in traffic, while those that did so infrequently or not at all experienced a decline in traffic.
In practice, it’s difficult to distinguish between pillar and cornerstone content. This is because both content strategies are:
In theory, pages with cornerstone content are referred to as the “cornerstones” of your website. These are the most valuable pages on your website. They’re what you’re known for, and they form the foundation upon which other pages are built. Think of“blogs,” “FAQs,” and other pages that demonstrate high authority and quality. So, this isn’t all that different from pillar pages. It’s more about how the term is positioned.
HubSpot, one of the most important and largest players in the field of marketing tools, introduced pillar pages as a content strategy, thereby establishing the term in the world of online marketing—specifically SEO. They describe a pillar page as the foundation of the underlying topic clusters. A pillar page therefore covers all aspects of a specific theme. The purpose of a pillar page is to interlink all the content on your website using hyperlinks. From the “cake recipes” pillar page, hyperlinks lead to topic clusters such as “red velvet cake recipe” or “apple pie recipe.”
In practice, people talk about different types of pillar pages. So-called “10x pillar pages” are pages that primarily link to the site’s own content. This is content that doesn’t need to be downloaded but is immediately readable by both visitors and search engines. This allows Google, for example, to read and evaluate the content right away. To convert a visitor into a customer or lead, it’s common practice with 10x pillar pages to offer visitors the option to download an e-book. The e-book then contains all the content related to the topic. In doing so, you collect personal data.
With a resource pillar page—the name pretty much says it all—the focus is on sharing resources. You’ll find both internal and external links on these types of pillar pages. The goal is to provide visitors with the best possible information on a specific topic, even if that means directing them to another website with relevant information. You can use resource pillar pages for link building to improve your backlink profile, which in turn has a positive impact on your SEO score. A well-known platform and good example of this is Wikipedia.
Before you can get started on your content strategy for pillar pages, it’s a good idea to create a mind map in advance, along with conducting keyword research. A mind map is a brainstorming strategy where you focus on a single topic and note related topics around it. This helps you identify which concepts and search terms are relevant, with the main topic serving as a frequently searched term. Through keyword research, you’ll learn everything there is to know about your target audience’s search behavior. This helps you identify which search terms are relevant for creating content.
Using the mind map, write a page of pillar content for the main topic. Keep in mind that pillar pages are “long reads.” They are highly informative pages that make use of rich content. Take plenty of time to develop this page and ensure it contains evergreen content so that it remains relevant for a long time. The table of contents on this page is a key component, as both visitors and search engines use it for navigation. This also includes clear HTML headings. Within the text, you should mention the cluster topics that fall under the main theme; these are often specific blog posts or pages highlighting a particular topic. Internal linking to these specific subtopics is very important for navigation and the internal link profile.
The cluster topics are organized based on subtopics derived from pillar pages. You can start shaping this during the brainstorming session. These pages provide website visitors with in-depth information on the main topic. This demonstrates your broad expertise, and visitors don’t have to leave the website to find additional information. For SEO, the focus here is really on long-tail keywords. By focusing on specific long-tail keywords, you ensure that pages covering the same topic do not compete with one another.