What Is A Pillar Page?
A pillar page is a long-form content page that covers a specific topic in detail. It provides users with everything they need to know about the topic and links to related resources for further exploitation.
A pillar page (also referred to as long-form articles, content pillars, or cornerstone content) can stand alone or be part of a topic cluster. Pillar pages are used to target high-volume topics and head keywords.
The main characteristics of pillar pages are:
- They are usually longer than normal blog posts.
- Content is around a specific topic.
- The content is broken down into sections
- Each section covers a specific sub-topic
Here is a real example of a pillar page published on this site on how to start an online business.
Why Are Pillar Pages Important For SEO?
There are many reasons why pillar pages are important for your SEO and content marketing efforts. The most important are:
They provide users and search engines with the content they want - For some topics, it’s more convenient for users to have all the information they need on one page instead of browsing through different articles.
This is also more convenient for search engines because it helps them serve users with results that keep them happy.
They can help you win featured snippets - The way pillar pages are structured makes it easier for search engines to crawl and meet all requirements for appearing at the top of the search results in the featured snippet box.
It’s a great way to prove your expertise about a topic - Google search ranking factors are heavily influenced by E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness), and high-quality pillar pages are a great way to build topical authority.
Combined with a few quality backlinks, you can establish your website as an authority on a specific topic.
They can help you rank high for competitive keywords - Pillar pages are usually long-form content pages, allowing you to naturally include related keywords in the content, which increases topic relevancy that (under conditions) leads to higher rankings. Also, pillar pages are more likely to attract natural links from other websites and mentions on social media networks.
How To Create A Pillar Page
- Decide What Topics To Target
- Choose The Appropriate Format
- Perform Keyword Research
- Create Your Content
- Optimize For SEO
- Add Internal And External Links
- Monitor SEO Performance
1. Decide What Topics To Target
The first step is to decide what topic your pillar page should target.
This depends on your niche and the topics/keywords already targeted by your existing content.
Some guidelines to follow:
- Choose broad topics - if a topic doesn’t have many sub-topics, it might not be ideal for a pillar page. A blog post on those topics might be enough.
- Choose topics with a high search volume - Creating pillar pages takes a lot of time and effort, and it’s not worth going after low-volume keywords.
- Choose topics relevant to your audience and business - Choose topics relevant to what your audience might want to read and can potentially generate more conversions for your business.
- Research your competitors - A great starting point is to analyze your main competitors and determine which topics they have pillar pages.
These are great candidates because they will generate a competitive advantage for you.
Avoid content duplication - Before choosing a topic, make sure that you don’t already have articles about the exact same topic published on your site. The last thing you want to create is to confuse search engines and run into duplicate content issues.
If you do have pages targeting identical topics, then you can consider improving your existing articles and turning them into pillar pages, creating new content and redirecting the old pages to the new pillar pages (using 301 redirects), or choosing to go with topic clusters (more on this below).
2. Choose The Appropriate Format
The next step is to decide what format to use for your pillar pages. There are two ways you can approach pillar pages.
Single Pillar Page
The first way is to have all content on one page, broken down into sections.
This is similar to the example demonstrated above. The main characteristics of this approach are:
- You have a single page targeting one high-volume topic.
- The page's title is general and contains the main keyword, i.e., “The Complete Content Marketing Guide’.
- The URL of the page is an exact match of the main topic keyword. For example, “/content-marketing”.
- The page URL comes directly after the domain name, i.e., com/content-marketing
- At the top of the page, you have a table of contents. Each item points to a section on the same page.
- Each section is marked as an H2 or H3 header tag.
- The page includes everything there is to know about the particular topic.
- It has sections with related links (or ‘Resources to learn more’) that point to other pages within the same site or external sites that cover a specific sub-topic in more detail.
- Sub-topic pages link back to the main page using the main head keyword in the anchor text.
- The page might have a structure and formatting different from your ‘normal’ articles. This is optional and not a requirement.
- The page is regularly updated to remain relevant.
Topic Clusters
The second way is to go with the topic cluster approach. With this approach, you have:
- The main page serves as an introduction to the topic.
- The main page lists sections (sub-topics) that point to other pages within the same site.
- Each sub-page covers a topic in detail.
- The URL of each sub-page includes the URL of the main page (see diagram above)
- Sub-pages have breadcrumb menus enabled that allows the users to easily go back to the main page.
- Sub-pages link to the main page and vice versa.
- Each sub-page has a pillar page's structure and other characteristics, as described above.
Which approach should be used, single pillar pages or topic clusters?
Both methods work great, but I prefer the single-pillar page approach. It’s less complex than topic clusters and easier to maintain and update.
If you choose topic clusters and later realize that you have chosen the ‘wrong sub-topics, ’ it might be more difficult to update than having all the content on one page.
I also believe the single pages (that are well organized) are more useful to users, too. They can stay on a page longer, print it (if they want), bookmark it, and share it more easily.
Here are a few examples of single pillar pages on my website that perform great on organic search.
A good way to find out which approach to use is to search your topic ideas on Google and examine what type of content they rank on the top positions.
3. Perform Keyword Research
Once you know which topics to target with a pillar page and what format to use, the next step is to do your keyword research.
At this stage, keyword research aims to determine which keywords to target in your pillar pages or topic clusters (whichever approach you choose, the keyword research process is the same).
Your keyword bucket should include both head keyword and long-tail keywords.
You can read ‘How to perform keyword research’ for step-by-step instructions on how to find the best keywords.
To create pillar pages, you need to have the following ready:
Your main head keyword - For example, ‘content marketing,’ ‘email marketing,’ ‘paleo diet,’ ‘make money online.’ ‘Start an online business’. Etc.
Related keywords to use as sections - Each head keyword has several keywords (usually have volume keywords, too) strongly related to the main topic.
These will be used as the section headings (for single pillar pages) or as individual page titles for topic clusters.
Great candidates for the sections are keywords that Google displays in the ‘People also Ask’ and ‘Related Queries’ sections.
Long-tail keywords are those related to the main keywords with a lower search volume but higher intent.
These keywords can make your content SEO-friendly and are also great candidates for creating supporting articles.
In other words, you can use long-tail keywords in your content and create stand-alone articles that you can use to link back to the main pillar page.
4. Create Your Content
The next step is to create a content outline and write the content.
Create a Content Outline
Creating a content outline is optional but highly recommended. I personally always follow this process before writing a new pillar page or blog post.
I found that spending some time thinking about your content and page structure before you start writing saves you a lot of time and makes writing easier and faster.
You can use the content outline to:
- Define your headings
- Select which existing pages on your site to link to as additional resources.
- Decide what each section will cover and which keywords it will target
- Your findings from analyzing your competitor’s pages
- Other ideas you may have about the design on the page
- Images/studies you will use to make your content more interesting
Write the content
Now, it’s time to write the content for your pillar page or sub-pages.
Content length - Although content length is NOT a Google ranking factor, a pillar page is expected to have a lot of content because it covers a range of topics in detail.
There is no definite guideline on how long (in terms of words) to make your content. It largely depends on the topic.
Here are a few tips to consider:
- Search Google for related topics and examine the content length of the pages that appear on the top positions.
- Don’t forget that users dislike spending hours reading about a topic. If that’s the case, you better write a book or an online course to give them all the details and use pillar pages to offer them the most important points.
- Don’t write more content than you need for the sake of SEO. I repeat that word count is not a ranking factor. Write enough to answer a user’s question or give them what they really need to know about a topic.
Optimize your content
- Follow basic on-page SEO and content SEO best practices to optimize your content so that search engines can understand it better.
Showcase your expertise - I mentioned above that one of the benefits of pillar pages is that they allow you to demonstrate your authority and expertise about a topic.
This is to be shown through the quality of your content. If you are an expert on the topic, make sure that you tell users about your experience and showcase any credentials that can prove your expertise.
These simple factors improve the content and create trust between you and your users.
Research studies and original data - One way to create content that will attract links from other websites is to back up your claims with research studies or better include original data.
For example, a pillar page about ‘content marketing’ that includes content marketing statistics from recent research studies is more likely to get the attention of other users than a pillar page that doesn’t include data evidence.
10X better than your competitors - I’ve often mentioned that looking at your competitors’ content is a good way to understand what type of content to create.
Something more important is to make sure that your content is 10X better than what has already been published. If you create something similar to existing content, then there is no incentive for users or search engines to prefer your content.
When we say make your content 10X better, we mean:
- More thorough and informative
- Less biased
- Takes a different angle on the topic than the existing content
- Better design
- Faster
- With better visual elements
5. Optimize For On-Page SEO
Add Visual Elements
The next step is to add visual elements to your pillar page to make the page more interesting and easier to read.
Visual elements can include:
- Videos
- Images
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Graphs
To take advantage of the visual elements for SEO purposes, make sure that you include the relevant ALT text for images and schema markup for videos and podcasts.
Optimize For Google Featured Snippets
The top position of the Google search results is sometimes occupied by one or more featured snippets instead of a normal listing.
A featured snippet is more dominant and occupies more real estate in the search results, making it attractive to users.
To make your pillar page eligible for a featured snippet, use the following tips:
- Add lists in your content using <ul> and <li> HTML tags
- Keep the list formatting simple (no custom bullets, arrows, or other styling)
- Add a relevant title for each list
- Format the list title to be an H2 or H3
- Add the list(s) at the beginning of the page when possible
Optimize For Sitelinks
Besides optimizing your pillar pages for featured snippets, you should also optimize them for page sitelinks.
Page sitelinks appear below in the search snippet below the meta description. They look like this:
Follow these tips:
- Each sub-section of your page should have a heading wrapped with an H2 or H3 tags
- For each heading, add an “id” attribute
- Add a table of contents on top of the page (like in this article)
- Add internal links to the different sections from your table of contents
Page Formatting
Before hitting the publish button, the last thing to do is revisit your page formatting.
This step is optional. It’s up to you to decide if you want your pillar pages to have a different format than the rest of your site pages. I prefer to use the same format across all my pages because it’s easier to manage, but you can follow a different path.
Regardless of what design format you choose to follow, you need to make sure that:
- The page loads fast and looks good on all devices (especially mobile)
- It’s easy for people who like to do skim reading
- Your headings for the different sections are formatted differently from the rest of the content
- Any images or videos are properly optimized (alt text, schema, image compression)
- The page has a default featured image and looks good when shared on social media.
6. Add Internal And External Links
Add Internal Links
As soon as you publish the page, search engines will get notified through your sitemap, and in a matter of hours, they will index your new page.
To help them understand the importance of your page and, at the same make it easier for your users to find the page, you need:
- Add a link pointing to your pillar page from your homepage.
- Add a link pointing to your pillar page from your blog's main page
- Add your pillar page to your sidebar (if you have sidebars)
- Add your pillar page to your main menu and footer
- Find related articles on your website and add internal links to your pillar page.
Don’t omit this step. It’s important to give the right signals to search engine crawlers to let them know that this page is important for your site.
Add External Links
You also need to promote your page on the Internet and try to get the attention of other bloggers with the ultimate goal of getting links and mentions.
This is part of what is known as off-page SEO and can positively influence your rankings in the short term but also in the long term.
Follow these tips:
- Send out a newsletter and inform your subscribers
- Publish your page on Facebook and use Facebook ads to promote the page to your existing audience (retargeting) and to new audiences
- Promote your page on Twitter (multiple times) and through Twitter paid ads
- Promote your page on other social networks related to your niche (LinkedIn, Pinterest)
If your pillar page includes case studies, research, or original data that can get the attention of the press, you can also write a press release and distribute it to all major networks.
If you added external links to your page, make sure that you contact the website owners and let them know about it. They will probably share the page on their networks, and some may even link back to it.
7. Monitor SEO Performance
Last but not least, you need to monitor the performance of your pillar page. You have already dedicated a lot of time (and possibly money) to creating the page; now it's time to find out if it was worth the effort.
The most important KPIs to monitor are:
- Pageviews - How many times your pillar page was viewed
- Bounce rate - The percentage of people that landed on the page and exited without visiting a second page from your site. The lower the number, the better.
- Email signups - How many people registered to your email list because of the pillar page
- Leads / Conversions - How many leads were generated from the pillar page
- Organic Traffic - How many people visited the page from search engines
- Rankings - for which keywords your page is ranking on Google and other search engines
- Visits from Social networks - Analyzed per network
- Social network interactions - how many people liked, shared, or commented on your page
You can use Google Analytics reports and the Google Search Console to gather and add this data to a spreadsheet or a Google Looker Studio report.
Don’t rush into making conclusions; as mentioned above, it may take several months for your page to reach its optimum rankings, so you need to be patient.
Key Learnings
Ranking for high-volume keywords is easier with pillar pages and topic clusters. The main purpose of creating a pillar page is to serve the user better, and if this is done correctly, search engines will follow.
There are two ways to approach this process. The first is by making a comprehensive page that includes all the information about a topic, and the second is to have the main page (to be used as an introduction) and separate pages for the sub-topics.
Of course, you can always combine the two methods and have a pillar page with in-depth information and separate sub-pages for the additional topics.
