Content marketing continues to increase in popularity and it is fastly becoming one of the most effective marketing methods. For example, did you know that 91% of businesses use video in their marketing? Or that B2C businesses heavily rely on short articles, and blog posts for their promotions?
We can see the importance, but it’s not easy as a business to churn out wave after wave of high-quality, engaging content. This is where pillar content helps. In this article, I explain the concept of pillar content, how it is used in content marketing, and why it is beneficial for your business.
What is a Content Pillar?
Pillar content is the starting point for your content marketing. It is a piece of long-form content relating to a specific theme or topic. This could be a report, a long-form web article, or an eBook, for example. It’s essentially a big chunk of content on one subject that you can utilize to create cluster content from.
Pillar content allows for cluster content
The main point of pillar content is that you can create cluster content from it. Cluster content is the smaller pieces of short-form content that you can use to target keywords and boost SEO. Examples of cluster content include:
- Infographics
- Videos
- Social media posts
- Guest blog posts
- Internal blog posts
- Webinars
- Landing pages
- Email campaigns
- eBooks
You’re essentially turning one large piece of content into a wealth of smaller snippets and forms that can be redistributed as unique content as part of your content marketing strategy.
Example of content pillars
Let’s look at theoretical content pillars examples so you can gain a clever picture. Take our client – 1st Choice Leisure Buildings, for example. This is a company that specializes in garden buildings like summer houses, log cabins, and garden offices.
They could create a content pillar for garden rooms as this is one of their top-selling products. The content pillar could be a long-form article explaining garden rooms, their uses, and their pros and cons. From this, a heap of cluster content could be linked and created.
How about a series of shorter blog articles and guides on how to use garden rooms? Maybe a set of social media posts could be created giving people ideas on what to use their garden rooms for. This could be complemented with some instructional videos on insulating garden rooms or applying external stain. Perhaps you could create a series of guest blog posts on online gardening magazines too.
Can you see the potential? That one piece of long-form pillar content can spawn potentially hundreds of cluster content all of which can have SEO and target your priority keywords. From this, you can also create a fantastic backlink and internal link catalog.
The Benefits of Pillar Content
You should now have a clear understanding of what pillar content is, but you may still not see the potential benefits. The main point of pillar content is to allow for easy content marketing generation but this is just one of the benefits:
It makes for easy content marketing generation
Any SEO consultant knows that part of a successful content marketing campaign is quantity as well as quality. The content you generate must be carefully crafted and engaging, but it must also be regular and consistent. The more you can churn out high-quality content, the better your SEO, website traffic, and conversions will ultimately be.
Using pillar content makes content generation easy. In the above example, we can see how just one content pillar relating to a specific product category can spawn potentially hundreds of pieces of content. With multiple content pillars, you have a virtually limitless amount of content for your long-term business development.
It drives SEO implementation
Pillar content is also fantastic for SEO. Google looks kindly at active businesses that generate quality content that their customers can benefit from.
Not only that but each piece of cluster content can be linked back to the content pillar and you can interlink the clusters too. This allows you to easily create a substantial backlink profile which is a huge plus for SEO.
Lastly, within the cluster content and the initial content pillar you can interweave your primary keywords. This can greatly boost your SEO and also things like Google PPC ads when you create landing pages from your content pillars.
Pillar content essentially goes hand in hand with SEO and the two work fantastically together.
You can work effectively and plan ahead
With content marketing and SEO, it’s often difficult to plan ahead and look to the future however, pillar content allows you to do this. By creating one piece of pillar content, you can plan and schedule a heap of additional content for weeks or even months to come.
This keeps your team focused and it ensures that everything runs smoothly. Your content marketing will become far more effective and this should then allow you to concentrate on other areas of your business knowing that you have a backlog of cluster content for months to work on.
Start Planning Your Pillar Content to Boost Your Content Marketing
If you want to keep ahead of your content marketing game then you need to utilize pillar content. Having a broad topic relating to your business so that you can create multiple pieces of cluster content ensures that you have a constant stream of content available. This, in turn, helps boost SEO, website traffic, your backlink profile, and keyword usage.
