SEO 101: Content Pillars

SEO is a topic that’s often mystified and misunderstood. In our new SEO 101 series, our in-house SEO master Ben takes you through some of the fundamentals of SEO in-depth and shows you how you can implement these in your own marketing!

Do you ever feel like your content creation process is a bit like throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks? What about those times where you spend hours meticulously crafting a piece you think will set your industry alight, only to have it lost among all the background noise? You’re not alone. It’s easily done; you’re stuck for ideas, so you grasp for anything relevant with some form of search intent behind it, create a piece and post it. Box ticked, content delivered, job done, right? Wrong.

Scattered content, with no clear direction or consideration of the ‘bigger picture’, can be disastrous for a site’s SEO. Luckily, there’s a simple solution to the problem, and I’ll discuss that today. That solution is the concept of content pillars, also known as pillar pages. Content pillars form the cornerstone of a successful, sustainable SEO strategy and set you up for the long term. SEO is evergreen, but only when it’s done properly and maintained correctly.

Simply put, content pillars are pieces of content that form the centrepiece of a wider content cluster. They provide an overview of a topic and link to other, related pieces of content. Let’s use an on-topic example here, since we’re all marketers or have some interest in marketing (at least, I hope so if you’ve read this far!):

Let’s say I want to write a piece on the basics of SEO (much like this series, in fact!) I could produce a long form, detailed guide on some of the core concepts of SEO. This would be my pillar page, or the topic at the centre of my cluster. From here, I could then create further pages and articles exploring each of those core concepts. I’d then link out to these from the main piece and vice versa (internal links are crucial! Say that again…) to join them together as part of the same cluster.

This technique is often referred to as a hub and spoke strategy because, when visualised, we have the central ‘hub’ and a number of related ‘spokes’ related to the main topic. Those of you that have been keeping a close eye on the new SGE changes coming to Google may have noticed a shift in emphasis towards topics over specific keywords, so there’s never been a better time to adopt this strategy!

If you’re in doubt about whether a piece of your content would make a good pillar page, ask yourself: Does the page provide a strong answer to any question on the topic it’s about? If not, does it link out to a related page that will? If you answered yes to either of those then you’ve got a solid foundation. Remember, the goal is to provide value to the user above all else. The SERP rankings are a side effect!

Okay, at the risk of sounding contradictory, content pillars are pretty important for SEO. I know I just said the rankings boost is a side effect and that’s true; we should always consider the human user before the search engine robot, but that doesn’t mean pillar pages shouldn’t be at the core of our strategy.

But why? I thought you’d never ask! Here are some of the ways content pillars boost your SERP rankings:

We’ve established that pillar content is important, but how do we go about building a solid, well thought out strategy to ensure we’re getting the maximum benefit? I’ll take you through that process shortly, but first, it can help to have access to a few things:

• Your favourite keyword research tool (ours is AhRefs, backed up with insights from Voxel). If you don’t have access to one, you can use Keyword Planner.
• Any actionable data on your target audience, what they’re interested in and what they’re looking for. This will make the first stages easier!
• A tool for trend research. Google Trends works, but my favourite is Exploding Topics.
• An AI tool such as ChatGPT can help to handle some of the heavy lifting. I dislike overreliance on AI for content creation, but as a data processing tool it is incredibly effective. Stay tuned for a tutorial on this!

Let’s go over the steps to create a successful cluster strategy:

Like, really get to know them. Content creation takes a long time, even if you’re using AI to help you. Remember, we don’t want to be throwing random things at the metaphorical wall and hoping one of them will stick. We want to be sure ahead of time that the content we create is going to connect with our audience.

There are a few ways we can get to know our audience, but my favourite is to create a persona. This way, we can build our ideal site visitor (and hopefully customer) and then start to tailor our content to them from the off. Ask things such as the following, and bear in mind what your current audience looks like as well as the type of user you’d like to attract:

Now we’ve gotten to know our audience, it’s time to decide what we’re actually going to say to them. Deciding on what they want should be pretty easy now we’ve done the groundwork and identified their needs, but we also need to make sure our brand is the right one to service those needs.

Let’s also consider how many pillar topics we should go for. There’s no one right answer, but it’s best to consider the size of your brand, what it offers and also your content creation capacity (say that fast!) It could be that you only start with a single pillar, but for most small to medium sized businesses with at least a few services, 3-5 pillars is a good sweet spot. For example, if I own a guitar shop that sells the instruments themselves, amplifiers and accessories then these would make 3 perfect topic pillars from which to cluster content.

There it is… That dirty phrase we’ve all heard a million times before as SEOs. You’re probably going to ask why we’re bothering with keyword research when we’re adopting a topic-based approach to our SEO.

Well, keywords are the actual searches that our users are conducting to find us. Gone are the days that we need to insert the phrase ‘men’s trainers nike size 9’ into every possible place on a page to stand a chance of ranking (yes, I have seen people who still think they need to get an exact match of every keyword into their content, no you really don’t need to), but that is what your average searcher might be looking for.

Our wider topics are made up of groups of keywords that we will cluster together in the next step. So, fire up your favourite keyword research tool and get searching! Don’t worry about being overly selective at this stage; the more data we have the better! I also recommend using the Voxel tool to supercharge your keyword research. Try popping in your chosen topics and your website domain and in a few seconds you’ll find yourself with thousands of keyword suggestions to choose from. Our friends at Voxel are also offering you a free 1 month trial of the tool, so you can try it alongside this guide with no commitment at all!

This is incredibly important! We now have our keywords, but we need to sort that raw data into something that’s actionable. You can cluster in a few different ways, but I highly recommend doing so by your pillar topics primarily and then splitting them again into subtopics. Take the aforementioned guitar shop example. One of our pillars is on the topic of guitars themselves. We could split this down into acoustic, electric and bass guitars as very basic but logical subtopics.

When clustering data, especially keywords, ChatGPT can be a lifesaver. There is an overuse of AI in the SEO industry for content production and that’s a real shame because so many of us believe that’s all software like GPT is for. The truth is AI produces pretty crappy content, especially without a decent prompt! But the power it offers us in terms of data processing is unrivalled. A detailed tutorial on this subject is beyond the scope of this guide, but please do get in touch with us if you’d like some advice and I’ll be happy to have a chat with you!

If your seed topics were strong and you used effective AI prompts then this should be a pretty short step. However, we always need to show due diligence and make sure the data we’re working with is accurate, appropriate, and effective. It’s at this stage we want to do a check over our clusters and ensure there aren’t any inappropriate keywords in there. If we find any then they can simply be deleted to trim down our data set.

We’ve found our topic pillars, done our keyword research and clustered those back into topics and subtopics, then trimmed down the data set so we have a solid list of organised keywords our audience are searching for. Things are looking pretty good! But, before we go rushing in and writing our next masterpiece, we want to evaluate any content and assets already at our disposal.

Unless the site we’re working on is brand new, it’s likely there’s at least some content on there already. Evaluate each page and think about where it fits within our strategy. Does the page fall under one of our pillars? Can it be tweaked or repurposed to?

Carrying out a detailed content audit at this stage will help you understand where the site you’re working on is at. It also helps us avoid potential duplicate content issues by exposing any existing pages that may already be targeting one of our topics or keywords.

Unless you’re doing something truly revolutionary, it’s likely you’re not alone in your industry. Every website has competitors, and you should know yours well. Using a tool such as SpyFU can help expose their strategies, as well as the keywords they’re ranking for. If budget is limited then your keyword research tool should have some form of competitor auditing functionality (AhRefs does, but SEMRush is the better option for competitor analysis).

Once you’ve established your competitors, you need to see what they’re doing to rank and decide how you’re going to beat them. A content gap analysis will show you exactly this and expose areas where your site may be lacking content. Make sure you spend time actually checking out your competitor’s websites as well; analysis tools are great but always back up the findings with your own eyes. Remember, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to do it better!

Now for the fun (time consuming) part! We’ve established our topics and our audience, gotten a picture of where our current content is at and what our competitors are doing, now it’s time to get creating!

Read around the subject and study the pieces that are already ranking well. Make notes and pay particular attention to the structure of each piece and any additional assets they use. Think images, videos, infographics and other visuals. These are all amazing for generating social traction and backlinks! Be sure to create your own visuals using Canva or similar to make your article even more engaging and shareable.

Don’t sell yourself short here; this should be the longest part of the whole process so far. Think of as many questions as you can around the topic and be sure to reference your keyword list too. As you’re writing, keep these questions in mind and answer them in as much detail as you can whilst remaining concise. Remember, we want to engage the user, not bore them!

Tip: Put a few of your keywords into search and pay attention to the ‘people also ask’ and ‘related searches’ sections of the SERPs. These are your secret weapon for nailing truly engaging content that captures what people are actually looking for. As a bonus, it also helps you rank for voice searches, which are growing ever more popular.

Now we’ve created some top quality pillar content and some related pieces to explore each subtopic in greater detail, it’s time to link them all together and complete the puzzle. Picture again the hub and spoke approach, with the pillar page at the centre and the subtopic pages surrounding it. We now need to create the spokes, and to do that we need to internally link the pages!

Your internal linking strategy is crucial. It helps the user navigate more easily and helps search engines discover and index your content better through ease of discoverability and contextual understanding. The internal link can go both ways; from the main pillar page to a subpage to encourage the user to read into that subtopic in greater detail, or from the subtopic page back to the main pillar if the user would like more information on the core topic.

As well as linking pillar and cluster pages together, we also want to ensure we’re providing a next step for the user so they know how to move to the next stage of the customer journey. This could be something as simple as a call to action like ‘call today for more information’ or ‘get in touch’. The important thing is to always be trying to move the user forward in their journey and further down your funnel.

Now we have our pillars, we should be conducting regular checks and maintenance to keep the content fresh and optimised. We should also keep adding to our clusters and building them out with new articles and content pieces over time. As we do this, new opportunities for internal links arise and our site becomes more and more well woven together.

Now we understand what content pillars are, why they’re so important and how to build them, let’s put our knowledge into practice.

Imagine you own a fitness brand that sells supplements. Your ideal customer is a newbie gymgoer in their 20s, living in a city and leading a busy lifestyle with a demanding career. They’re driven and motivated but time is at a premium. They want to keep fit and they want to look after their health. They also enjoy learning new things and aren’t afraid to invest in themselves.

There are going to be a few things that the person above needs to consider on their fitness journey: their actual workouts, their nutrition and supplementation and their recovery to name a few. I don’t know about you, but I can already see some distinct pillars forming here!

The initial temptation might be to focus solely on supplementation (after all, that’s what we’re selling!) but really, we should be placing equal focus on all these areas. No one wants to read an article on the top 10 protein powders on the market right now, only to find that you’ve placed yours at the top. It’s as predictable as your average sitcom ending and it makes you look arrogant. Sure, you might have the best damn product on the planet, but says who? And when you’re probably already shouting about that on the product page itself, who really cares? It wastes the user’s time and causes you to repeat yourself.

Instead of the above hackneyed, overused and quite frankly irritating approach, think about some of the more valuable topics related to each of your pillars. Take the workouts pillar as an example. Your target customer is new to the gym. They’re probably nervous (gyms are intimidating places, right?) and unsure where to start. Wouldn’t a comprehensive beginner’s gym guide with a few actionable takeaways and starter workouts be great for them about now? Of course it would. And it doesn’t matter that this has almost certainly been done plenty of times before either. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, you just need to do it better. Content that’s been created lots of times has been for a reason, because people want to read about it!

Now, let’s do some keyword research around this topic. I put ‘gym for beginners’ and ‘beginners guide to the gym’ into AhRefs and got 1,202 keyword suggestions. Filtering those by the term ‘beginners’ produced the following:

Looking more closely, we can see several subtopics emerging. The way you cluster your subtopics is up to you, but I would advise to keep it as logical as you can. In this case, I’d go for strength training, gym workouts, home workouts and workouts for females as our clusters from the dataset above.

Note: this is only a small dataset for the sake of conciseness and clarity. In reality there would be many more keywords, and there would likely be a few more subtopics.

Next, we need to clean our dataset. In this case, where we are using a small number of keywords, the data is already fairly clean. However, we can group the plural forms of terms with the singular such as ‘gym workout for beginners’ and ‘gym workouts for beginners’ as they are essentially identical. Here, we could also add the 2 search volumes together to get a more accurate view of demand. In the case of any terms which are not appropriate, simply delete them from your list.

Once we have a clean set of clustered keyword data, we only have a couple more things to do. The next step in our process is a content audit.

In this case, let’s say our existing content is fairly thin, but we find an old post with a simple weight training workout and another on the top 10 exercises to build muscle quickly. Ignoring the cliched title of the latter, we can conclude that these pieces, whilst potentially useful once refreshed, are not a suitable base for our pillar content. What we can do is keep them for use as spokes in our cluster strategy, but we need to create a new piece from scratch.

Our final step before writing the content is to see what our competitors are doing. We run an analysis and find 2 key competitors, ABC Supplements and XYZ Nutrition. ABC have made the rookie error of sticking to top 10 articles (and guess what? They’ve put all their own products at the top of each… Oh so predictable) but XYZ have a fairly detailed beginners guide on their blog. Reading the guide more closely, we can see some solid, well curated advice but find the article lacking any information on how to choose the right gym for you or on female specific training.

Boom, there’s our silver bullet. Well, bullets. We know there’s strong search volume around workouts for females thanks to our previous keyword research and we know choosing the right gym is going to be an important element of the reader’s fitness journey. These can therefore form key parts of our pillar page.

Now it’s time to create our content. We write an in-depth beginners guide, making sure to add specific sections on how to choose the right gym for you and workouts for women. Then, we also produce separate articles on these subtopics. Once the content is all produced and we are happy with it, we can get it live on the site, link the pillar page to the cluster page and vice versa. The last step is just to make sure you include a link to your services or online shop to ensure the reader has somewhere to go next.

And THAT is job done.

Pillar pages are one of my favourite SEO strategies, and I personally see them as essential. In some ways SEO is a glorified guessing game, with us all trying constantly to crack this mysterious and ever-changing code that is the Google algorithm, but content pillars are and will always be a valuable tool. With the SGE changes coming to both Google and Bing, I believe this will become even more so. I also love the idea of anything that gets us away from the incessant temptation to keyword stuff and create content that reads so badly that it’s offensive to the eyes.

SEO is an ever-changing battlefield that requires a constant ‘adapt and overcome’ mindset. Content pillars are an evergreen tactic that will always be a safe bet in your arsenal of tools. Use them well and watch your user engagement time, sessions and conversions increase as your users discover and love your new content.

Thank you for reading, and I do hope you’ve found this guide useful. For more help, or to chat to me about all things SEO, please do feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected]. Are you interested in having me and my team create you your very own content pillar strategy? Then fill out our contact form and we’ll be happy to arrange a free audit.