Executing the Best Content Pillar Strategy
If you want to create good quality and consistent content for social media and websites, you need to know about content pillar strategy. In this article, Viva One Digital will guide you to achieve the best content pillar strategy.
Here are what we are going to cover in this guide for content pillar strategy.
- What is a content pillar?
- Why is the content pillar important for brands?
- Content pillar in action: Topic clusters
- How to find and use content pillars
- Wrap Up
What is a content pillar?
Let’s start by knowing about the content pillar strategy first. Content pillar is a set of main topics that is the foundation of every content of your websites or social media. Content pillar should reflect your brand products and expertise. It should revolve around your business field. Also the content pillar should be something that your audience is interested in as well.
Content pillar is the foundation of your content strategy. Content pillar is there to guide every type of content, not just writing pieces. Videos, images, social media posts such as Tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram posts and stories, and other content of your brand should all be based on the content pillar.
Why is the content pillar important for brands?
Having content pillars is like having a life plan for your brand. It guides you to create quality content consistently and it helps organize your content as well.
Content pillars make your overall content seem organized instead of jumping from downhill to the mountaintop all the time. It also helps you organize the workload of creating and publishing content as well. With content pillar strategy, you can create a calendar or plan for every content. You can set the date and time to finish and publish the content. It will create organization in the work flow and also provide a great opportunity for arranging the content to make better sense and impact as well.
Not only do the content pillars help organize your content, it also helps with consistently content posting and creating as well. If you implement the content pillar strategy, you will have a long-term plan of content and topics that you can work with. Then, you will never get stuck when you can’t come up with the content to write about, since you already have sets of relevant topics of content ready to use.
Another benefit of content pillars is that it helps you cover lots of topics. It expands your target audience and does not leave any audience behind. When you create various content in a variety of topics, you reach more people that might potentially be interested in your brand’s products or services.
Content pillar in action: Topic clusters
Now that you know what a content pillar is and its benefits, let’s see how content pillars are used in content writing.
In content writing for SEO, content hub is very important. It is a collection of webpages that are related to the same topic and link together with hyperlink. One type of content hub is ‘topic cluster’.
In the topic cluster, there are two types of content which are pillar content and cluster content.
Pillar Content
Pillar content will be presented as a pillar page. It will provide general and broad information about the main topic. The keyword used for the pillar page will be broad, not specific nor narrow. The pillar page will cover many subtopics. The pillar page keyword can be as broad as ‘flower’, ‘football’ or ‘website design’.
For example, in the website design pillar page you might mention briefly about layouts, color palettes, and typography.
Cluster Content
Cluster content is the opposite of the pillar content. While pillar content is general and broad, cluster content focuses more deeply in each subtopic. Cluster content are blogs or posts that talk about one specific topic at a time. Cluster content are all of the subtopics from the pillar page.
From the example pillar page which is about website design, the cluster content can be blogs about layouts, color palettes, and typography. In these blogs, you will provide more information and more detail, not just a brief version like in the pillar page.
The pillar page and cluster content page will be linked to each other with hyperlink for the reader to find out more about the topic. Internal links between the pillar page and cluster content is very important. This is because the pillar page will be nothing if you do not link them to the cluster pages. It makes your brand and website look like an expert and leader among the competitors. It will make you be loved by both search engines and the audience.
See this image from Mangools for better understanding about topic clusters.
How to find and use content pillars
As you now see the benefits and how the content pillar is used, let’s learn how to get your own content pillar and how to use it properly.
Choose topics and subtopics
To start the process, you need to come up with the board topics or the themes that you want your content to be about first. Choose the topics that are relevant to your brands and are loved by the customers. Or you can choose the topics that will draw in your target audience as well. These topics will become your pillar contents.
When you get your pillar content, now it is time to think about all the small topics about them. These subtopics are the cluster contents. When you try to generate cluster content, think about what people must know, want to know, and be interested to know about that topic. Be specific, thorough and creative.
Do keyword research
When you finish choosing topics and subtopics for content writing, the next step is to come up with the keywords for each content.
To have the best focus keywords, you need to do keyword research to find the keywords that have the high search volume and can rank well in search engines.
Having the right keywords will make your articles reach more people and bring more traffic to your website. While using keywords that have low search volume will not bring as much traffic to your website.
Plan the order of content
Now before start writing and posting your content. You should plan when and in what order you will post them. This will make your work more organized and it will make your content consistent and go well together.
Planning the order of your content includes both planning what to post first, second, third, and so on and planning the date and time to write and publish.
The order of the content that you post or publish to the internet is important since it can make impacts to your brand’s image and popularity. If you arrange the content in easy to follow and intriguing order, the audience will tend to stick around and revisit the site more.
And if you plan your content posting well enough, you will be able to post regularly without getting stuck as well. Posting consistently is important for SEO ranking. It is also a way to keep in touch with your audience as well. If you are not posting content regularly, the audience might lose interest and go to your competitors instead.
Start writing
Not that you plan everything from topics, keywords, to schedule, it is time to start creating content.
When writing the content, stick to the focus keywords. Place them in important elements of the blogs or posts. Also, make sure that your content is high quality.
Another thing is to keep in mind which type of content you are writing. If you write the pillar page, you need to mention everything that is in the cluster list. And if you write the cluster content, be sure to be specific, give lots of details for the audience.
hyperlinks
When writing with a topic cluster model, you can either start with cluster content pages or pillar pages. But you need to remember to link them to each other. The purpose of the pillar page is to be the hub of each topic. You need to hyperlink the cluster content to pillar page, and also link the pillar page to the cluster content as well.
These internal links within your domain will be favored by the search engines since it will signal the search engines that your website is expert in this field. Moreover, the audience will benefit from these links as well. It is the way to accommodate your audience to learn more about that topic. And when the audience knows that your brand offers a variety of good content, they will keep coming back.
Wrap Up
And these are steps of finding and using the content piller. We hope this guide for implementing content pillar strategy will be beneficial for you. Try applying content pillars and topic clusters to your content strategy so you can create better content and make your website become more successful and known by more people.