After all, content creation isn’t cheap. You must plan for maximum ROI.
But don't worry. We've written a guide that walks you through the basics of content pillars—including how to plan content buckets and drive content production from them.
Let’s get on with it.
A content pillar is an authoritative, long-form piece of content focused on a key theme or head keyword relevant to your brand.
Content pillars also go by "flagship content" and "cornerstone content."
With a broad-topic-based pillar page in place, you can then create topic clusters or content pieces related to the pillar post. The goal is to create a focused content strategy and boost your search engine optimization.
Here’s how a pillar page strategy helps your audience:
As for improving your SEO, here's how a pillar-based content marketing plan helps:
💡 Learn more: How to create a winning content marketing strategy: A 12-step template
Interested in fueling your content strategy based on pillars? Follow this 5-step blueprint:
Begin with understanding your target audience and what pressing issues they face. This is essential information for planning content that solves these pain points.
Solving your target audience’s problems with helpful content isn’t enough.
You need to make sure the content pillars you create are related to your business, too. Then, you can subtly mention or link to your product as a solution to readers’ problems.
Find out exactly what content topics they’re searching for.
Here’s how:
With the list of ideas ready, create your content plan by finalizing pillars pages to create.
Keep in mind: there’s no limit to the number of content pillars to add to your content marketing strategy. Just be sure to set realistic goals around creating pillar pages.
What's more, focus on creating quality content, which takes time on its own.
Before you begin, lay out your production plan into a content calendar so you can start creating high-quality content by set deadlines.
For the pillar page, be sure to write authoritative content without going into specifics about any subtopics. This helps you leave room for creating topic clusters discussing specifics in detail.
💡 Learn more: Content management: Everything you need to know about strategically managing your content
Once your pillar page is ready, add hyperlinks to related topic cluster content.
Here’s a visualization of how topic clusters relate to a pillar page as explained by HubSpot, which is widely known for adopting the pillar content strategy for their site:
In reality, all the hyperlinking looks like this:
Or, there's a visually engaging way to add them too:
With multiple content pillars, here’s how the entire strategy works:
Want to make sure you correctly link to the relevant content pieces?
Lay out your entire content strategy as shown above. This gives you a bird’s eye view of all your content, so you don’t miss linking any page.
One more thing: Every time you create a new piece of content based on a pillar page’s theme, update the pillar post by adding a link to the new resource.
💡 Pro tip: Refresh your pillar pages regularly. This will help you provide up-to-date, evergreen content that’s highly valuable to readers and does well in the SERPs too.
Having pillar pages in place means you’ll never scramble for last-minute content ideas.
Instead, the content pillar’s topic guides your content creation as you can work on different types of content related to the pillar’s theme.
Content pillars can also guide your social media marketing, as you can repurpose pillar page content into content for social media such as Twitter threads and LinkedIn posts.
Moreover, you can share the evergreen pillar page(s) on your social channels, providing more fodder for sharing content.
💡 Learn more: A step-by-step guide: How to improve your content workflow
Not to mention, you can reuse pillar content in different formats.
For example, create a podcast pilot episode based on the pillar page. Then, record more episodes based on the content you’ve created for topic clusters. This way, your podcast can focus on one topic—going deeper into it with each episode.
Similarly, you can repurpose pillar page content by creating infographics. Here are more ideas for content repurposing.
In short, content pillars play an important role in your content strategy. Want a head start to planning pillar posts?
After all, content creation isn’t cheap. You must plan for maximum ROI.
But don't worry. We've written a guide that walks you through the basics of content pillars—including how to plan content buckets and drive content production from them.
Let’s get on with it.
A content pillar is an authoritative, long-form piece of content focused on a key theme or head keyword relevant to your brand.
Content pillars also go by "flagship content" and "cornerstone content."
With a broad-topic-based pillar page in place, you can then create topic clusters or content pieces related to the pillar post. The goal is to create a focused content strategy and boost your search engine optimization.
Here’s how a pillar page strategy helps your audience:
As for improving your SEO, here's how a pillar-based content marketing plan helps:
💡 Learn more: How to create a winning content marketing strategy: A 12-step template
Interested in fueling your content strategy based on pillars? Follow this 5-step blueprint:
Begin with understanding your target audience and what pressing issues they face. This is essential information for planning content that solves these pain points.
Solving your target audience’s problems with helpful content isn’t enough.
You need to make sure the content pillars you create are related to your business, too. Then, you can subtly mention or link to your product as a solution to readers’ problems.
Find out exactly what content topics they’re searching for.
Here’s how:
With the list of ideas ready, create your content plan by finalizing pillars pages to create.
Keep in mind: there’s no limit to the number of content pillars to add to your content marketing strategy. Just be sure to set realistic goals around creating pillar pages.
What's more, focus on creating quality content, which takes time on its own.
Before you begin, lay out your production plan into a content calendar so you can start creating high-quality content by set deadlines.
For the pillar page, be sure to write authoritative content without going into specifics about any subtopics. This helps you leave room for creating topic clusters discussing specifics in detail.
💡 Learn more: Content management: Everything you need to know about strategically managing your content
Once your pillar page is ready, add hyperlinks to related topic cluster content.
Here’s a visualization of how topic clusters relate to a pillar page as explained by HubSpot, which is widely known for adopting the pillar content strategy for their site:
In reality, all the hyperlinking looks like this:
Or, there's a visually engaging way to add them too:
With multiple content pillars, here’s how the entire strategy works:
Want to make sure you correctly link to the relevant content pieces?
Lay out your entire content strategy as shown above. This gives you a bird’s eye view of all your content, so you don’t miss linking any page.
One more thing: Every time you create a new piece of content based on a pillar page’s theme, update the pillar post by adding a link to the new resource.
💡 Pro tip: Refresh your pillar pages regularly. This will help you provide up-to-date, evergreen content that’s highly valuable to readers and does well in the SERPs too.
Having pillar pages in place means you’ll never scramble for last-minute content ideas.
Instead, the content pillar’s topic guides your content creation as you can work on different types of content related to the pillar’s theme.
Content pillars can also guide your social media marketing, as you can repurpose pillar page content into content for social media such as Twitter threads and LinkedIn posts.
Moreover, you can share the evergreen pillar page(s) on your social channels, providing more fodder for sharing content.
💡 Learn more: A step-by-step guide: How to improve your content workflow
Not to mention, you can reuse pillar content in different formats.
For example, create a podcast pilot episode based on the pillar page. Then, record more episodes based on the content you’ve created for topic clusters. This way, your podcast can focus on one topic—going deeper into it with each episode.
Similarly, you can repurpose pillar page content by creating infographics. Here are more ideas for content repurposing.
In short, content pillars play an important role in your content strategy. Want a head start to planning pillar posts?
Masooma Memon is a pizza-loving freelance writer for SaaS. When she’s not writing actionable blog posts or checking off tasks from her to-do list, she has her head buried in a fantasy novel or business book. Connect with her on Twitter.