We shall now move on to discussing why pillar keywords and pillar posts are serve to be essential factors in ranking. Creating content with the right pillar keywords and pillar posts has the potential to draw traffic to your site without having to break your head over it.
What Are Pillar Pages?
Similar to how pillars are used in buildings to support other structural elements so that the building maintains its stability and has an understood layout, pillars serve the same purpose in web pages. The primary information that forms the cornerstone of a subject cluster is a pillar page. You can organize linked blog entries under relevant subjects with the use of pillar pages to make it easier for your audience to find what they’re looking for.
This page’s core concept is to create a collection of similar content on your website using internal linking, followed by having a primary landing page that serves as a catalog for all the links in that group on the pillar page. Is it too confusing? Okay! Let’s say you own a website for home décor. You’ve authored articles about how to design your living room, bedroom, bathroom, and other spaces. Your readers may find it challenging to locate precise information if all your stuff is in one location.
With pillar pages, you can make topic clusters where you may divide the relevant blogs into groups. For instance, you could gather all the blogs about inexpensive decorating ideas into one group, ideas for decorating a living room into another group, and so on.
Your website’s content is essentially connected via pillar pages. You can easily create a pillar and then connect all the blog posts that are very similar to it.
Purpose Of Using Pillar Pages
A pillar page is a homepage on your website that specializes in a crucial subject or service. People and search engines can easily access a large amount of contextually relevant content on these pages.
Additionally, pillar pages can assist in organizing the content of your website, making it simpler for users to navigate and discover the information they need. You can design a more seamless and user-friendly website experience by collecting relevant material under one umbrella topic.
Pillar pages provide a better website structure that is understandable and practical and is simple for visitors and search engines to reach. Additionally, when the search engine bots perceive the content properly, they may crawl it more effectively, which can raise the rating of your website on SERPs.
In addition, if your pillar pages are put together by experts, maintain authority, and offer high-quality content, this will help your website perform better and rank higher. More people will be interested in the content you provide, which will help your SEO.
By creating the pillar pages as keyword-rich, creative, and educational as possible, many website owners also use it as a means to increase the number of backlinks to their page. Ultimately, the more visitors to your website and the longer they stay there, the more chances you have to collect their contact information and turn them into leads.
How Do You Create Pillar Keywords?
We shall have to go back to our keyword research phase where we used seed keywords in Ahrefs to receive some incredible long-tail keywords suggestions. There is no need to go through all the pages of results. The first few pages would do the trick. You will have to start with targeting the biggest keyword and then putting together a list of all the relevant keywords, because they all the same search intent. Therefore, when you are successful in ranking for one keyword, you will eventually rank for all the others similar in meaning.
Therefore, the ideal step would be to target one long-tail keyword using Ahrefs, and then creating content with it. You will not only have ranked for that keyword, but would also be targeting all the similar keywords together and drawing substantial traffic. On-page SEO plays a big role in pillar posts, too.
How Do You Target All The Keywords?
There are certain ways in which you can target all the similar and relevant keywords. Here’s how you should be going about it.
Title/Description Elements-
Title descriptions and tags enlighten the audience as to what they can expect out of the content of a certain website. Therefore, you must understand how important it is for you to optimise the description of the title. Google pays a lot of importance to websites which has the title tags and description it deems fit.
So this is what you do, and it is pretty much the same process. You need to come up with a list of all the keywords as similar to the pillar keyword. Once you have that, you can use them in the meta-description using your creativity.
What Are Pillar Posts?
Pillar posts are the main posts on your blog which is responsible for drawing most of the traffic and acquiring quality backlinks from authority sites.
In this article, we shall look at the best ways to write and format a pillar post, differentiate between the styles, and debunk some myths associated with them.
Now that we are done discussing pillar keywords, we need to move our attention towards pillar posts. Pillar posts are the initial posts that you create around a pillar keyword for the purpose of ranking. Thus, the name-pillar posts support the existence of your new website and your website success in terms of ranking depends on how well you have framed the content of your pillar post.
You must keep in mind that the number of pillar posts that you need to include in your website depends on the search volume you are targeting. 2 or 3 pillar posts are a decent number to begin with.
Formatting a Pillar Post:
It is not enough to just put together a massive piece, with the number of words running over 2000. You need to format the article appropriately if you really want to make use of the pillar post. Of course the number of words is one of the major factors that set your pillar post apart from other posts. However, you need to factor in other aspects of formatting too.
Sub-topics Must Be Well Researched-
You cannot have sub-topics in your pillar posts just for the heck of it. You need to do some research on those sub-topics before you write them in the post. You cannot hope to finish off with explaining the sub-topics in one or two sentences.
Get really deep into it and provide at least a few solid paragraphs of valuable information in these sub-topics. However, do not just keep writing on and on without any content. Some topics might not have much meat to it, which is fine.
Therefore, you need to find a way of including as much information as possible in every sub-topic.
Consider Linking Out to External Sites-
Your audience will love reading an article which is backed up by relevant external links. This means when you link your pillar post to external links containing information on the same niche, you are only increasing the credibility of the information you put out using your pillar post.
Also, Wikipedia might look like a decent website to link for your pillar post. However, think beyond Wikipedia. Link all the articles that you have used to write the pillar post. This is more like providing your audience with a bibliography that can be found at the end of a research paper.
Every source is put together so that your audience understands that your article is well researched and genuine. Place the externals links at the end of every section so that it looks well organised and sorted.
Post Images Along With the Articles-
Posting images that is in alignment with the spirit of your post can enhance the ranking factor. It shall do you good if you find relevant images and post it wherever it sits well with the article.
It enhances user experience as well as gives an edge to your article. Audience love it when they have something graphic to refer to that represents what they just read. Pexels is a great site to scout for images. But make sure you read their terms and conditions before you use any of the images.
Some of them might want to be credited, and it is your duty to conform to the copyright rules if a particular image has it. However, most of these images are free and can be used at one’s will.
Have a Clean Layout and Use In-Page Links-
Have your pillar posts segregated into paragraphs, topics and sub-topics. This makes it an easy read. Also, make it a point to have in-page links. In-page links make navigation easy for audience as they would not have to keep scrolling to land at a particular section.
They could just use one of those links and read the section that interests them the most. This method is highly engaging and shall make sure that your audience stays on your page, which is quite an important factor for ranking.
The Types of Pillar Posts:
There are essentially two types of pillar posts that you need to know about before settling on any one style.
The Ultimate Guide-
This type of pillar post takes a lot of time to write. It is exacting and has information from various sources woven together in one single piece.
The words usually run beyond 5000 and sometimes over 20,000 as well. These are not like any standard blog piece. They are custom designed which thus, sets it apart from every other blog piece.
The custom design of the ultimate guide is responsible for getting a high number of social shares and links from good sites.
The Standard Blog Piece-
The standard blog piece is a simpler approach to pillar posts in terms of design and layout. It has valuable information but does not have a design as vivid as that of an ultimate guide. The word limit is also restricted to 2000 to 5000 words. However, all these pillar posts can be linked together from within the posts.
It is always advisable to use the standard blog format for articles within the word limit of 2000-5000 words. However, if it runs beyond the said limit, the ultimate guide format is the best choice.
One Major Misconception Regarding Pillar Posts:
People include random topics in the pillar posts, just for the sake of it and to make it look longer. This is deleterious to ranking. When someone searches for a keyword, they need specific answers to their question.
There is nothing more disappointing than scouring through the internet only to land on a website that discusses things remotely associated to the keyword. There is no dearth of material on the internet.
You need to use the resources generously to be able to come up with a long pillar post with valuable information.
SEO Tips For Your Pillar Posts
Although SEO might seem to be extremely complex, it has gotten a lot simpler with the help of numerous guides and SEO services. Google is fully aware of your website and what it takes to rank well in search engine results. A cornerstone page with pillar posts serves as the main point and links to other pages which promote it. If you don’t correctly optimize these posts, you can drive away many website visitors. How, then, do you make your pillar posts SEO-friendly? Here are a few tips and tricks:
Focus On Short-Tail Keywords
It’s essential to concentrate on short-tail keywords while writing pillar posts. For instance, “How to remodel a bedroom” is a good cornerstone topic and an excellent short-tail keyword. In addition to the primary topic, there may be subtopics like “How to remodel a bedroom on a budget” or “How to remodel a bedroom in a modern way.” Always use long tail keywords for other web pages and short tail keywords solely for pillar posts.
Start Linking Your Pillar Posts
Include links to your pillar posts from your homepage in the primary content section of your website that’s easily visible. The pillar posts shouldn’t be on the sidebar, footer, or menu bar, as they are the spaces that people are less likely to see. Additionally, because these components are frequently constant across all pages, there is more of a chance that Google will devalue them.
Linking Of The Pillar Posts Should Be Both Ways Round
You must make sure that the articles to which your pillar posts link likewise have a link back to them. Since the articles’ subjects already connect to one another, this should be simple to do. Additionally, when linking to those articles, be sure the links are organically positioned throughout the contents of the page.
Link your pillar posts as much as possible
You should always link to your pillar posts whenever you come across an article on one of your main topics. You can use various tools, but the most effective one is Yoast’s plug-in which will provide you with linking prospects once you choose a page as a cornerstone page.
Work On Basic SEO On-Page Optimization
This advice may seem basic, but it will work wonders for your pillar posts. Make sure you adhere to on-page SEO optimization by including CTA and properly organizing your posts. The content should contain relevant keywords, but you shouldn’t overuse them. With an informative body, create an engaging headline to grab readers’ attention. Don’t forget to include linked posts, which will encourage visitors to explore more of your website and increase the dwell time on your website.
Conclusion
Pillar keywords and pillar posts are what shall decide the future of your website. They are called pillars for a reason. Therefore, make sure that you have highly optimised content for your pillar posts so that Google understands the relevance and your website shows up on the search results for that specific search keyword.
Whether you should go for the ultimate guide format or the standard blog piece, and whether you need to opt for custom designing or not, can only be justly answered by your personal need. Do not follow a format only because you think it is in trend. Doing something with half knowledge is damaging and shall only hinder your ranking on the search engines.
FAQ
Why are pillar keywords and pillar posts important for SEO?
If the content has pillar keywords that are different and informative and pillar posts that have subjects addressed from all perspectives, they can help to boost the rank in the search results. If the post is optimized with the relevant keywords, people will be able to find what they are looking for in an easy way.
How do pillar pages help your search engine rankings?
Pillar pages provide an easy-to-use one-stop source for various relevant topics. These pages are useful in improving your search engine rankings since they give search engines systematically organized content that is simple to crawl and understand, increasing the page’s ranking.
How should pillar posts be optimized for SEO?
As the title is the first thing people will see, it is important to make it appealing when optimizing pillar posts for SEO to improve their visibility on search engines. Use short-tail keywords to make your title tag simple and informative to make it engaging.
Add a meta description so that people searching for what you provide will be encouraged to click on the link to your website.
Incorporate short-tail keywords in the page’s initial 100 words and final few words.
Ensure all your web pages are highly responsive and compatible with mobile and desktop devices.
Use your keywords in the file name containing your images and the ALT features in the <Img> tags.
Employ LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords that are synonyms for your keywords in your pillar posts to help Google know the overall objective of your page.
Link to as many different pages as you can from your main page to encourage visitors to explore more of your website.
To help Google understand the topic of your page, link to related off-site resources.
Keep your URL short, to the point, and keyword-focused.
How to identify potential pillar keywords?
Before identifying the prospective pillar keywords, decide on the general subject matter for your blog post according to your niche.
You can then use a keyword research tool and select a few subjects to find the best keywords.
Once you receive the results, get rid of any terms that are too generic, have limited traffic from searches, or are unrelated to your industry.
Select the top keywords for your blog after filtering the irrelevant ones.
Analyze the SERP competitiveness for each keyword you have chosen, then list your suggestions for pillar posts.
Choose a pillar page keyword that meets the keyword’s search intent and has a strong chance of ranking better when all the analysis has been completed.