Pillar Page

SEO is always evolving.

Just when you think you fully understand SEO, something new comes along

As a search engine’s algorithm changes, so do the best strategies to optimise your blog to rank on the first page of SERPs.

Things that have changed in SEO are:

• Human search behaviours
• Technology that understands and deals with search results

So, using long-tail keywords to optimise your blog content is not the best way to rank on the search engine results.

and your blog architecture has something to do with that.

In this blog post we will learn:

• How search has changed
• Changes in blog architecture
• Topic clusters
• Pillar pages

So, let’s dive right in.

What Are Topic Clusters?

Bloggers and SEO people are changing the way they create content because people have changed the way they search.

Keep reading to learn the basics of how search is changing:

Now people use longer conversational search queries.

More than half of searchers enter four words or more as a Google search query to help find the exact information they are looking for.

For example, if they are looking for a place to eat indian food, they use longer-form conversational search queries such as:

• “Indian restaurant near me”

Instead of just:

• “Restaurant”

Part of the reason is because of the increase in voice search.

20% of Google searches on mobile devices are from voice search on Siri and Google Assistant.

And this will increase due to the increasing use of Amazon Echo and Google Home devices.

Other reasons people are using longer queries for search are:

• Filter quality content from the junk information out there
• Find quality content faster

Also, searchers are skimming content to quickly get answers to questions, reading the headers of blog posts or Google’s featured information.

And search engines are getting better at providing searchers with the best and most accurate pieces of content.

Search engines better provide searchers exactly what they want.

Google is constantly improving to give their searchers the best answers to their queries.

The changes in Google’s algorithm includes:

• Penalising websites with too many irrelevant internal links
• Better understanding conversational queries compared to individual keywords
• Using machine-learning for an accurate understanding of specific terms

So, even if the results don’t reflect exactly what you searched for, Google will still help searchers find the most accurate information possible.

For example, searching for “running shoes” on Google will also show search results for “sneakers.”

Meaning, SEO people and bloggers need to create and organise better content that answers any knowledge gaps so searchers get all the information they need from your website.

Now, for your website and it’s content to address as many searches as possible about a particular subject:

• Organise your website based on the different main topics
• Target specific, conversational long-tail keywords in your blog posts
• Hyperlinked your blog post’s relevant subjects to each other

Topic clusters help pages rank by giving searchers better answers.

Current blogs have disorganised structures that make it hard for website visitors to find the information they need.

Because SEO people and bloggers create individual blog posts to rank for specific keywords.

And, when you create a lot of blog posts around similar topics, your own URLs compete with each other in search engine rankings.

The solution to this problem is to use the topic clusters model.

Topic clusters model is a new way of:

• Ranking your content in search
• Best answering the new types of queries by searchers

The topic clustering model works by:

• Picking broad topics you want to rank for
• Creating content based on specific keywords related to these topics
• Linking your content to each other

This content model helps make your website a topical authority for search engines.

And, your blog infrastructure should have topics surrounded by related blog posts which are hyperlinked to other URLs in the cluster.

Using an organised site architecture with linking URLs, this model:

• helps more pages on your site rank in Google
• help searchers find information on your site more easily

A topic cluster architecture has three elements:

• Pillar content
• Cluster content
• Hyperlinks

Next we will learn about:

Pillar content, which is the main topic that you want to rank by making cluster content around this main topic.

What Is a Pillar Page?

A pillar page is the base content page that your topic cluster pages are built on.

A pillar page will highlight all about the main topic on a single page.

And the cluster blog posts will go into more detail about different aspects discussed on the pillar page.

Then the cluster pages will hyperlink back to the pillar page.

So, basically pillar pages cover an overview of a topic, and cluster content talks in-depth about a certain keyword related to the main topic.

For example, a pillar page about a broad topic would be SEO and a cluster content would be about content or technical SEO, which is a specific keyword in that topic.

Key features of pillar pages include:

• Being longer than typical blog posts
• Cover all areas of a topic you want to rank for
• Not as in-depth, more like an overview

Then that’s where cluster contents come in and go into more detail about each sub-topic.

So, create a pillar page that answers questions about your main topic, giving a brief introduction to sub-topics.

Allowing cluster content to go into more detail and answer searchers questions more thoroughly.

For example, a pillar page about Content marketing.

Would give a brief overview covering all aspects of how content marketing works, and it would be hyperlinked to a specific piece of cluster content about pillar pages.

And this example would try to rank for topics related to Content.

The pillar page would be a 101 guide to Content marketing with the cluster content going into Pillar pages, a sub-topic of Content marketing.

How to Create a Pillar Page

To start creating a pillar page, think about the topics you want to rank for first, not just keywords.

List ideas for blog topics around specific keywords related to your broader topic.

Think about your audience’s personal interests and challenges for pillar page content ideas.

When it comes to topic ideas, pick an idea that is:

• Broad enough for related blog cluster content posts
• Not very broad so you can’t cover the topic on your pillar page

For example, A topic that is too broad would be:

• “Marketing”

But a topic that would be too narrow would be:

• “Content headlines”

So, you need a topic that is broad enough to link to more blog posts like:

• “SEO”

This topic choice is broad enough to write a pillar page about but you can still go into more subtopics on SEO.

When searchers enter terms your web pages rank for, make them click your pillar page by creating content that answers questions or queries about a topic.

Then when browsing your pillar page, searchers will be linked to more specific cluster content through hyperlinks.