It’s a new year, which means a fresh start and a great time to take charge of your business’ digital marketing. As you set New Year’s resolutions, consider adding your website’s content to the list.
Good content will make a huge difference when it comes to how long visitors stay on your site and how well they are able to find it in the first place.
Improving your SEO is always a good goal to have and to continually strive for.
There are many different ways to improve your content; you can post weekly or bi-weekly blog posts, or incorporate videos or animation on your website. (These efforts also help to improve SEO).
You can also improve your content by looking a little deeper and revamping the way your website is built. And there’s no better way to do it than with pillar pages.
Pillar pages, if you need a refresher, are a few key pages that support the rest of your website and content. As you build (or rebuild) your website, you’ll want to consider how your posts or pages will be arranged under “topic clusters”, which will be similarly themed groups of content.
As you begin building, arranging, and organizing your content into these groups and connecting them, you create your pillar pages to bring all the topic clusters together. You make finding these subtopics much easier while making your website more organized. Using hyperlinks, your pillar pages keep all of the content on your website connected.
So how will pillar pages help your SEO?
It has to do with that organization and “cleanliness” that comes when you use them. With so much information and so many pages online, it is easy for pages to get lost or buried. This is especially true when it comes to search engines working to provide a user with search results.
Google, for example, prefers web pages that are easy to find. If you have a clean website with clear hyperlinks telling Google exactly where to go, your odds of Google pulling up your page in a search result is much better.
In fact, the more internal linking you have, the better your SERP placement will be. And since ranking as high as possible is what SEO is all about, you can’t afford not to incorporate pillar pages into your website.
As you group your content together and break it down into pillars, then topic clusters, you are creating a roadmap for both users and search engines to get to any and all of your information as painlessly and clearly as possible. It will become very clear what your content is about, and where it can be found.
Google and other search engines love that. And users will love being able to find exactly what they’re looking for, as well as easily find similar and related content too.
Search engines (and humans) want to go to a source that seems to be reliable and competent. The more you write about a single topic, the better ranked you’ll be. Demonstrate to your expertise is by linking all of your related content through pillar pages and help your SEO in the process.
