Let me ask you something: do you want a straightforward way to boost traffic to your website?

Look no further than the all-mighty pillar page.

Never heard of them? Don’t worry, we’ll dive deep into what pillar pages are, why they work, and how you can start utilizing them on your own website. If you want to drive more traffic to your website and bring in new customers, you’re going to have to rank high on Google’s search results. Pillar pages make it simple to organize content around a core topic for your business, so that Google knows you’re the real expert and your site should come first.

There’s a lot to cover here, so we’ll include examples from our website for you to follow along with when creating your own. Let’s get to it!

What is a Pillar Page?

In short, a pillar page is a web page that contains links to related pieces of content on your website. These could be anything from your website that can educate visitors and answer their questions, like blog posts or landing pages.

So what’s the tangible benefit? Pillar pages let Google know your website is an authority on a certain topic related to your business. In order to get the most out of your pillar page, the first step is to research what topics or keywords you want your brand to be known for.

If you’re in private wealth management, you most likely want to be known for helping people plan for their retirement, handle their estate, and invest in an index fund or a hedge fund. How about the marketing consultants out there: you want to be known for SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing. Before diving into creating pillar pages, it is crucial for you to explicitly outline these values before moving on.

Now that you’ve got your topics set, it’s time to get to work and create pillar pages for each of these core topics.

A pillar page can be thought of an index or table of contents of sorts—you share a bit of copy per each sub topic with a link to an existing blog post. This provides a robust resource on a core topic to your business, and gives Google a big ‘heads up’ that you’re an expert—but more on that later.

For example, my team has created pillar pages for: content strategy, keyword research, and analytics, with more in the works. To bolster these pillar pages, we’ve created content for the sub-topics underneath the core topics. For content strategy, we’ve written blog posts on identifying your target market, creating a blog schedule, knowing what topics to cover, and some light SEO work. For the core topics in your business, there are likely several sub-topics related to them that you ought to be writing about.

Why do pillar pages work?

Pillar pages bring a huge SEO boost to your site, but how?

There’s a long answer, and a short answer. The long answer can get quite technical, so we stick with the short answer: Google’s algorithm works in mysterious ways and worrying about the minutiae of SEO is not important to your business. What is important, though, is that pillar pages link pieces of content from your site together around a core idea, and that is something Google appreciates and looks favorably upon.

Take us for example: we may have a couple dozen blog posts on content strategy. On their own they’re doing just fine, but their impact is limited. When catalogued together, we suddenly have a page that brings a ton of value to prospects, as well as existing customers. The pillar page also covers a wide array of related questions, and is a page that we can rank for on Google while opening the door to other content across our site.

If you’ve got a blog, then a pillar page really is just about organizing your posts and creating a page that links to them. If you don’t have a blog yet, then start blogging with your core topics in mind.

How do I Decide When to Make a Pillar Page?

We touched on it above, but it’s worth really digging in with some examples from our approach.

Your pillar pages should be built with core topics related to your business in mind, therefore avoid making a pillar page for every topic you you to hit. We recommend starting with five or so; five is a manageable number that shouldn’t overwhelm you or your visitors. Keep these five pages broad, so they can encompass a number of topics.

For own team, those pages are: SEO, Content Marketing, Keyword Research, Social Media Marketing, and Business Blogging.

There are other topics we cover on our site, but if we had to choose five core topics we want to be known for, these are them. For each core topic, there are likely keywords related to those topics that folks are searching for. Things like “affordable SEO strategies”, “what is seo”, “how do do keyword research”, “how to measure keyword research”, etc. We collect those sub-keywords and form clusters (we call them Constellations), then map out our blog strategy around them.

If five sounds intimidating, it’s okay to start with one. What is one thing you want your business to be known for? What questions might folks be asking or searching for related to that topic? From there, you’ll know what kind of content to create and your pillar page will organize it neatly for your visitors.

Our Pillar Page as an Example

We’ve covered a lot here, but an example may help those who are still on the fence. Everyone needs a little inspiration now and then, so we’ll share and analyze a couple of our own pillar pages for you to model off of.

Let’s take a look at our page on developing a content strategy.

Developing a content strategy is all about three things: knowing who you are trying to reach, the story you want to tell, and how to go about actually telling it. The page is designed for folks who may be new to blogging or content marketing and need to know the basics. We’ve got five resources linked, though we will likely add more as we continue to blog (and you should do the same for your own pillar pages).

The immediate benefit this provides is making our pages more favorable to Google’s algorithm. Collecting our posts written over the year to actually tell a story will help Google recognize that we’re experts, and thus will hold our page in higher regard.

Takeaway

To somebody just learning about pillar pages, this all sounds like a lot of work. Between blogging often, collecting each post into a story, and formatting the page itself, some startups mistakenly believe that it’s not worth the resources. Hopefully, we’ve shown through our personal experiences and explanation that pillar pages are an invaluable tool in drawing more traffic to your site.

If, even after this article, you can’t justify doing it yourself, we’ve got a way that make things a bit simpler (re: a lot simpler). Our company, Centori, offers a free platform that identifies core topics for your website, creates clusters of related keywords around those topics and allows you to find content from your industry for those clusters. You can reduce the above process down to a few minutes and button clicks – you can learn more here: www.centori.io.

We hope this post has illuminated the SEO-wrangling wonder that is pillar pages. Leave tips, tricks, questions, and comments below!