If you’ve paid attention to search engine optimization, you know there are always ways to improve and update how visible your website is to the people you want to see it most. You’ve beefed up your keywords and built your website with precision.
What else can you do? One way you can improve your SEO is with pillar pages. What are pillar pages?
Here’s a simple guide to what they are and how they can help you.
What Are Pillar Pages?
Pillar pages have to do with the way your website is built, hence the architectural name. Part of incorporating pillar pages means to build your website around a few key pages.
But before getting too in-depth with pillar pages, you need to consider topic clusters. If your website has a blog, chances are they are all in one spot. As Google and other search engines update and refine their ability to provide users with exactly what they’re looking for across the internet, being organized and specific on your website become more and more important. Simply having all content, despite good keywords, in one place won’t cut it. Instead, consider your keywords and come up with a few different categories. You’ll want to then organize your content within these topic clusters. This will help make it easier for your content to be searched and found.
As you group together content under a certain topic or idea, you are essentially creating the idea behind a pillar page. All that is left is to actually create the page, and link or direct all of your content with the same idea back to that particular pillar page.
How To Create A Pillar Page?
Because creating a pillar page also requires reorganizing and redirecting your content into topic clusters, creating pillar pages can be kind of overwhelming. Before you begin messing with your website, take some time to think about how you’re going to reorganize. Brainstorm what makes most sense; research what will help drive the most traffic. If it helps, physically draw or write out your plan from your overall topic, to the pillar page, to your topic clusters, to individual posts or content.
This is where it is crucial to understand how your customers search for content. If it is highly specific, you’ll want to adjust your pillar pages accordingly. The same goes for more generic searches. The best way to make these considerations is to have extensive knowledge and research about your target audience.
When you’re ready to move forward, begin making changes to your website with just one pillar page and one cluster of topics. Start slow, and see how it goes. Not everyone is able to do this themselves, and that’s ok. In fact, managing all of your marketing needs is no easy feat. To avoid spreading yourself too thin and allowing your business to suffer for it, consider hiring a digital marketing specialist.
