One of the biggest quality of life improvements to come to content marketing has to be the pillar page. In many ways, it’s the natural evolution of inbound marketing, where information availability and content organization pay dividends. Let’s discuss the concept in more detail and how to put it into practice.
What Are Pillar Pages?
Pillar pages (or pillar content) are a method of content organization that groups similar topics in your content library together to improve site navigation, content clarity, and SEO.
For example, rather than having a dozen lead generation blogs scattered across your site, you’ll create a primary topic page (the “pillar” page) that offers a brief overview of the material and has links to every other blog you’ve published on the topic.
To visualize this structure, imagine the spokes on a wheel. In this analogy, your broad pillar page is the wheel “hub,” with the spokes being every other blog you’ve published on the topic. The pillar page is your primary anchor point for navigation, with every other blog pointing back to it via hyperlink.
It sounds simple—but compared to traditional content library layouts, this structure has some serious advantages.
What Are the Benefits?
There are two key benefits to pillar pages: An improved user experience, and SEO.
The Pillar Page UX
Inbound marketing relies on efficient information delivery; readers need to be able to find the content they want right when they want it. This concept is the cornerstone of content marketing as it pertains to the buyer’s journey. Regardless of which marketing funnel stage your readers are in, they’ll have a better browsing experience when all of your content topics are laid out and categorized in a single page.
Pillar Pages for SEO
Although Google’s exact algorithms aren’t public, we know that its AI platform RankBrain gave the company a big leap in context-sensitive search results. This means that search crawlers are paying attention to more variables in how well a page ranks to provide more meaningful results to users. Creating a clear navigational hierarchy makes it easy for these crawlers to understand each piece of content and how that content fits in your overall sitemap.
Aside from that, it just makes sense to approach your website’s content production with a strategy: In one survey, 72 percent of B2B marketers agreed that a developed content strategy was crucial to their organization’s success.
Start Planning Your Pillar Pages
Best of all, it’s easy to build pillar pages. To start, you’ll need to perform a site-wide content audit that lists out all your assets. Take stock of your content topics and the keyword phrases you’ve built your blogs around.
Your goal is to determine the best selection of topics to make pillar pages out of, and then flesh those broad topics out with links to more focused, in-depth pieces. This might require some restructuring of your sitemap, but it’s an investment well worth making. It won’t be long before pillar pages become the standard for inbound marketing, and companies need to get ahead of the trend while they can.
