B2B Pillar Pages: Step-by-step strategy
Over the years, we have found from our personal experience, in a B2B setup, top-of-the-funnel is a crucial foot-in-the-door. Such content enables the target audience and prospects to self-learn about the brand and the industry at large. And with the correct steering reels them towards the much desired CTA (call to action), like filling out a form or requesting a demo.
So, what kind of content matches high search volume conversational queries?
Answer: Pillar pages.
What are Pillar Pages?
A pillar page is an SEO anchor piece that takes a deep dive into a topic linked to your business. Then it is internally linked to your cluster pages targeted at those long tails, secondary keywords that answer the questions your audience may have. People referred to it as the hub and spoke content or umbrella content.
It is imperative to link your cluster pages to your pillar page and vice-versa.
Pillar Pages have broadly two benefits — Topic authority and SEO.
They help build topic authority by answering all the questions surrounding this topic that your buyers are asking. This, in turn, tells search engines that your content is the most relevant and informative resource available and helps in improving the ranking.
Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create a pillar content strategy:
1. Select a topic — By selecting a broad topic, you must find enough secondary keywords with search volumes. Be sure not to pick a “not too broad” topic, as it will be challenging to create one piece of content that covers all the aspects. For example, if you want to write content on “social media marketing”, that might be a little bit too broad, but if you’re going to write something on “important of hashtags in social media,” it will be easy to rank for those keywords.
2. Through keyword research — Every pillar page you create should have target keywords associated with the content. It would be best if you did extensive keyword research for search queries for your topic clusters. Think about your target customers’ personas, their concerns, and the type of questions they ask.
You can start with one topic and expand the list of keywords to find all of the secondary keywords that you want to include in your content.
Apart from using traditional keyword research tools like Google Search Console, you can also pull ideas from Google autocomplete suggestions and the related searches at the bottom of the SERPs.
3. Check your existing content repository — To save time, make sure that you check your existing content pool. Updating old content often adds more value than writing a new one from scratch.
4. User-friendly URL structure — This step is all about finding a place on your website to put your pillar page content. You might want to link it to your most viewed page or any other page where you want your target audience to land.
Pro tip: Add your cluster pages in the same sub folder as your pillar page.
5. Write content — At this point, you know what your topic will be, and your topic clusters are packed with links. But, first things first. For your pillar page, you would want to have an introductory section which talks about the topic areas as a whole, which will link out to all other secondary pages.
You want to make sure that in the content, you include a lot of mid-funnel CTAs, as it becomes a hub where everyone is going to navigate to and from those cluster pages.
As far as cluster pages are concerned, you would want to put in-depth content. The question and answer format is a good approach for this as it helps optimize for featured snippets.
6. Promote your content — After making sure that you have covered all the above points, don’t forget to promote your content. Make sure to share it on social media. Reach out to anyone in your industry who you think would benefit from this content and willing to share it as well.
7. Measure the effectiveness — Keep optimizing the keywords by adding more or removing redundant ones, if any. Use Google Analytics to check your landing page, your website traffic source and conversion rate.
Make sure you measure the effectiveness of the content and perform the necessary changes like swapping out your CTAs, adding a structured snippet or glossary.
8. Repeat — Once you have covered all the steps, repeat the whole process after finding another topic that is relevant to your industry.
Bottom line:
Pillar content pieces should be verbose and have everything that a page could have — relevant keywords — long tail or high search volume, materials covering the industry as a whole, data and stats, infographics, table of contents, CTAs where applicable, and everything in between.
Writing a pillar piece is not a one-time effort. It instead is a much involved and intense process with multiple phases of execution.
Talk to us to get results from your digital content marketing efforts.
