Content Pillar Marketing: a Free Guide

A content pillar is a central topic in a content series that is essential to your brand. The pillar is shaped around your content and the brand’s overall message. It’s like a minimalist domino that links the rest of your content.

Content pillar marketing is about influencing and engaging current and new customers through engaging content. It’s about creating a holistic brand experience that answers all their questions.

Content Pillar Marketing: the Basics

Content pillar marketing is a strategy for building an effective and successful content marketing plan. It focuses on creating a central theme or topic that informs all of the other pieces of content in your brand’s campaign. This pillar helps unify the messages in each piece of content, allowing them to work together to reinforce your brand’s mission and overall message.

By creating this solid base, brands can build off it by addressing customer questions through creative, engaging content. Content pillar marketing aims to create a more holistic experience for current customers and attract new ones. Brands can showcase their expertise, voice, and personality with this type of content marketing. 

For example, let’s say you are launching a new product. You could use the content pillar to create blog posts or videos about different aspects of the product. Doing this helps you establish yourself as an authority on the topic.

Through thoughtful and tailored content, potential customers can easily understand what the product offers and trust the company behind it.

Benefits of Pillar Content

Are there any benefits to using content pillar marketing? Yes, there are many benefits that come with it. Check them out below.

Increases Visitor’s Dwell Time on Your Page

With a well-written pillar page, you can increase visitors’ dwell time on your page. Dwell time refers to the amount of time a searcher spends on a page before returning to the search engine result page.

A longer dwell time indicates that the searcher finds your page useful. With longer dwell times, Google perceives your page as relevant and useful for the search term. In addition, a longer dwell time means your bounce rate will also reduce.

All these metrics help to improve your rankings because they indicate that your page is useful to searchers.

Gets You Quality Backlinks

Another major benefit that comes with having a well-written content pillar page is that it gets you backlinks. Quality backlinks are highly treasured in the world of search engine optimization.

Backlinks represent recommendations that link back to your page. Since pillar pages often contain comprehensive content, they can earn you backlinks from other reputable websites. Quality backlinks to your page also increase its relevance.

Improved User Experience

Another benefit of content pillars is that they improve the overall user experience on your page.

The pillar page usually links to the other, shorter content pages within your website. This creates a flow of visitor-specific content. So, the visitor is not bombarded with the same content, yet each content page keeps the user engaged.

How to Create an Effective Content Pillar Page

Creating a content pillar page requires several steps to ensure you nail it. You can only reap the benefits explained above if you do things correctly.

Understand Your Audience

Before doing anything else, you have to understand your audience. This process entails watching what people are doing and why and then building a message for them.

Check social media to find out your target audience’s main problems and other things they discuss. You can use the insight gained from the process to structure your pillar page.

In the end, you’ll be able to create a pillar page that resonates with them.

Research Your Competition

Your content must be unique to stand any chance out there. The pillar page must offer something extra and different from what is currently out there.

To do this, you must research similar pillar pages online to see what they are doing and how you can beat them. Find out if there are topic gaps they didn’t cover at all or if there are those they didn’t cover well enough.

Keyword Research

Find out what keywords your potential customers type into search engines. Doing this can optimize your pillar page to include exactly what customers are searching for.

Decide the Set-Up

Pillar pages take several forms in terms of structure and content. There are 10X pillar pages that are meant to be very long and ten times better than the next best content. There are also service pillar pages and resource pillar pages.

In terms of the specific content, there are quite a few options as well. You can opt to write guides that comprehensively explain a topic. “How-to” pillar pages explain how to do a particular thing.

“What is” pillar pages aim to answer frequently asked questions about topics. It is important to note that this division is not clear-cut. There can be overlaps in some instances. The most important thing is to create well-researched content that solves your audience’s problems.

Final Thoughts

As content marketing becomes more popular and a standard marketing strategy, businesses need to consider content pillar pages. Pillar pages are like the regular pillars you see in buildings. They serve as a strong base for other related content on the website.

They can be a destination for visitors who want to learn more about a particular topic. This is because they give a foundation for the rest of your content about a particular topic.