What are pillar pages and why do you need to know about them?
A pillar page is a website landing page. It should focus on a key topic, a resource, a product or even a service area. The purpose of pillar pages are to help both users and search engines to quickly gain access to lots of content that is topically relevant.
Depending on the purpose of your pillar page its depth will vary. Some will make use of a more shallow introduction in order to gain faster access to any additional content, a role not dissimilar to that of a contents page. However, others can be very comprehensive. The latter allows for a better standalone value that is then supported by content items that it relates to.
What Should My Pillar Pages Be About?
If you created a list of any core topics that are linked to your business, then each of these could warrant a pillar page.
The purpose of a pillar page is to give individuals single-stop access to a selection of content that is related in a way that is user-friendly. They also provide content that is organised in a logical manner for search engines. This allows for it to be trawled through and understood easily. As a result, it can be ranked for searches in an effective manner.
The terms content hubs, cornerstone content, and content clusters are all nuances of the same approach as pillar pages.
Centering Your Pillar Pages
Think of the pillar page as the hub at the centre of a bicycle wheel; the central topic or theme. The spokes are all of the related content that connects to and from the pillar page. An individual pillar page may have several pages and other content types linked to the pillar page. This can be done through sub topics that can be linked back to the pillar page.
How the pages interact remains fundamentally the same with all related content being centralised from on main landing page, the pillar page.
How Can Pillar Pages Help You?
When it comes to you SEO, pillar pages are a must. There are a good many different benefits of the pillar page which we will cover:
Strengthening Topical Authority Signals
Google guidelines are underpinned by Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). These are used to give a website a quality score. When content is considers to be of a high quality it will be ranked higher consistently. The reason for this is that is seen as helpful content that has been created by experts in that sector and has been placed on the right site with the appropriate authority signals.
Allow For Easy Crawling
When you group your content, you make it easier for search engines to understand and identify your content for ranking purposes. In this way pillar pages can add real value to your website.
Improve User Experience
Pillar pages can also offer a much more complete experience for users, one that is both simpler and faster to use. They also offer a more natural and value based way of link building within your site that allows for better movement from one page to the next.
Finally, they can help you to find gaps in your content. That way, you can fill them and improve your visibility. Furthermore. you can also improve the structure of your site internally, reduce your bounce rates, and improve your other metrics.
