What Is a Pillar Page? The Better Approach to SEO
The Glorious Company Team
Striving to get to the 1st page of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for their keywords is the goal of any digital marketer. Getting there can be quite the challenge, depending on your niche and the competitiveness of your keywords. Competition in today’s organic search is fiercer than ever.
Structuring your website to make it easier for people and search engines to understand what your content is about and how different types of content relate to each other greatly helps your SEO. Such a structure also builds authority for your website.
That’s what a pillar page achieves for your online presence.
What Is a Pillar Page?
Let’s get more in-depth into the purpose of these types of pages.
Think of a pillar page as a content hub that directs your site visitors to more specific and related pieces of content, which explore topics in your pillar page in even greater detail. A pillar page is the basic building block of content topics that you want to discuss and offers readers a thorough overview of broader aspects of these topics.
Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say your pillar page is going to be about content marketing. You’d title it something high-level, like “The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for 2024.” You would discuss topics like keyword research, blogging, ebooks, case studies, and email marketing in different sections of this pillar page. Then, you would create more detailed articles about each of these separate topics in turn, which your pillar page would internally link to and also be linked from.
In this way, a pillar page is the starting point for topic clusters, which we’ll talk about next.
What Are Topic Clusters?
Topic clusters are your groups of related blog posts, articles, or webpages that explore a specific, main topic first broadly, as in the case of a pillar page, and then more explicitly, through cluster pages. The whole point of topic clusters is to establish your website as an authority on the subject in the algorithm and rankings of search engines like Google. Whereas pillar pages target primary keywords that are short-tail or quite broad in nature, cluster pages will target keywords that are long-tail or more specific in nature.
In our example pillar page above—“The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for 2024”—the primary keyword could be something as basic as “content marketing.”
If one of our cluster pages would be an article on keyword research, then its primary keyword phrase could be something more detailed, like “how to do keyword research.”
Similarly, if one of our cluster pages would be an article on blogging, then its primary keyword phrase could be the more in-depth “how to write a blog post.”
For each specific cluster page, that article would then be fleshed out to be as comprehensive of a guide on that subtopic as possible.
What Are the Benefits of Pillar Pages?
Before the introduction of pillar pages a few years ago, the SEO strategy of many websites was as follows: Write a lot of individual blog posts that target a specific keyword or phrase, but without a coherent plan to relate topics and subtopics. The ensuing result was somewhat disorganized, making it harder for site visitors to find all the related content on websites, as well as for search engines to efficiently understand what different pages talk about and how they’re related.
Thanks to the pillar page model and the use of topic clusters, a lot has changed for the better. Here are some of the main benefits your website will experience when you switch over to this well-organized approach to creating content on the web.
More Backlink Opportunities
A pillar page is your one-stop shop for the start of a detailed examination of a topic. As such, it’s a highly valuable resource for anyone who’s interested in a topic cluster deep dive of that subject matter. This alone makes it a prized opportunity for organic link building, as people will naturally want to link back to authoritative pages like this that answer a lot of their questions and address their pain points.
Cut Down on Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is annoying! Yet many websites accept it as a fact of life, especially with bigger websites that have thousands and thousands of pages. However, keyword cannibalization means you’re competing with yourself for the same keywords when you’ve optimized multiple pages for the same phrase or if your content is too similar.
The beauty of a pillar page and topic clusters is that you have granular oversight into what keywords you’re targeting and what topics you’re covering in detail. Due to this well-structured approach, you can ensure that you only target unique keywords and keyword phrases, so you don’t duplicate content and end up competing with yourself on the SERPs.
Increase Your E-E-A-T Signals
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It’s part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, and, while not a direct ranking factor, the company prioritizes search results that demonstrate strong E-E-A-T.
Creating more pillar pages and topic clusters on your website can help you establish your website as demonstrating strong E-E-A-T. By grouping related content together and writing about topics authoritatively, you’re making it simpler for Google’s bots to crawl your site and its algorithm to understand and rank your content properly. When you compare that to other websites that are cannibalizing their own keywords in poorly organized content structures, your pillar page structure goes a long way toward convincing Google that your website is high quality.
How to Create Your Pillar Page
Let’s create a hypothetical pillar page, so that you have actionable ideas on how to apply this to your content strategy.
Plan Your Pillar Page and Topic Clusters
First, we’ll have to choose a topic, which is really the basis of any pillar page.
Let’s choose SEO as our main topic cluster since it’s a very broad area of interest around which we can organize a lot of subtopic content. Going with “SEO” as our main keyword is a no-brainer for this pillar page. Let’s title it “Everything You Need to Know About SEO to Be Successful.”
Now that we have our pillar page ideated, we can move on to start brainstorming some of the cluster pages that our new pillar page will lead to.
One cluster page could be a deep dive into what a keyword gap analysis is meant to do and conducting one in an analytics tool like Semrush. We could title it “How to Do a Keyword Gap Analysis” and optimize it for a phrase like “keyword gap analysis.”
Another possibility for a cluster page could be a guide into internal linking, including the benefits to site navigation and SERP rankings that well-thought-out internal links provide. We could title this cluster page “The Dos and Don’ts of Internal Linking” and optimize it for the primary keyword phrase of “internal linking best practices.”
You’re beginning to get the idea: The main pillar page about SEO is our starting point, and each cluster page talks about a subtopic of SEO in a more in-depth manner. Depending on how many areas of SEO we want to broadly include in our pillar page and how long we want to make our pillar page, we could almost have an unlimited supply of content ideas for our ensuing cluster pages.
If you need help with some inspiration during your pillar page planning, you can consult a tool like Semrush, which is quite common for a content marketing agency to rely on for cluster planning. With a monthly subscription, you can access its tools like the Keyword Magic Tool, which gives you a highly detailed breakdown of broad keywords and their long-tail, related keyword phrases, along with the keyword difficulty, the likelihood of ranking for that term, search volume, and traffic potential.
In fact, creating sound topic clusters that have a lot of depth is hard to do without having a bird’s eye view of the exact keywords and keyword phrases that are available. Tools like Semrush, while they will cost you monthly or yearly, are worth it.
Of course, you can also use free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner Tool for ideation, if you’d rather not make the investment in a paid tool. Keyword Planner will also give you a lot of ideas, in the form of related keyword phrases, after you type in a head keyword, along with data on average monthly searches.
Write Your Content
A pillar page is a long-form deep dive into your main topic, so think of it as a highly in-depth blog post. Pillar pages are generally on the long side, in the range of a few to even several thousand words long.
The main criteria to satisfy is to write comprehensively about your overall topic while covering more specific areas of interest broadly. These areas of interest will then branch out into your cluster pages, where you’ll go more in detail into each subtopic while planning for internal links to and from your pillar page and cluster pages.
Here are a few tips to ensure you write a high-performing pillar page:
Make it evergreen so that it stays fresh for a long time.
Optimize your pillar page for search engines.
Ensure readability by including a table of contents, headings and subheads, short paragraphs, bullet points, and images to promote easy reading.
Add elements like videos, charts, tables, or even infographics to stand out.
Add Relevant Internal Links
This is highly important: Make sure you always add relevant internal links to and from your pillar pages and cluster pages. If you’ve already published a pillar page—but your cluster page isn’t yet ready to publish—don’t sweat it. Keep your pillar page live, and, once you publish your cluster page, simply add a link, along with contextual anchor text, pointing to your new cluster page.
Your cluster page should also link back to your pillar page. This internal linking structure is critical to a logical information architecture on your website and will make it easier for search engines to properly index and rank your content.
Promote Your Pillar Page
As with any piece of content you create, promoting it is something that you should be in the habit of. Your pillar page, due to its length and propensity to therefore rank for numerous organic search keywords, should do well in the SERPs. You can build on this by promoting it across various channels as well.
Here are some ways to promote your pillar page:
Social Media — Whether on X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or even LinkedIn, sharing a link to your new pillar page with your followers will give it instant exposure.
Email Newsletter — If you run an email newsletter, then including a mention of your pillar page in a relevant email blast will showcase it to an entirely different audience. You can promote it as part of a series of informational content about your topic clusters.
Paid Ads — Run some paid ads on Google or even various social media platforms, which advertise your pillar page. If you have CTAs within your pillar page that go to specific lead magnets people can download or products you’re promoting, then this approach will give your pillar page extra exposure and more conversions.
Consistently Create Pillar Pages
After you’ve ideated your first topic cluster and written and published your first pillar page and cluster pages, the key is not to stop. Don’t rest on your laurels. Instead, take what you’ve learned from the process of this style of content creation and shift your content production into overdrive.
The more pillar pages and cluster pages you publish, the more you’ll rank for numerous organic keywords, which will allow people searching on Google to discover your website for a vast array of keywords and phrases.
The more you keep creating pillar pages, the easier it’ll get, which will only make the content production process even more efficient and the benefits of structuring your content in this way more tangible.
If you’re searching for a content marketing agency you can partner with to plan, write, and create your pillar pages and topic clusters, then reach out to us today. Contact The Glorious Company today for a no-obligation consultation and estimate.
Any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below.
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