A content strategy guides the creation of content published across different channels. Search engine algorithms and the ways people search for information online are constantly evolving, so your content strategy needs to evolve too. That's where pillar pages come in. Built on customer understanding, pillar pages improve the architecture of your web content and help people find what you publish.
The digital space holds an endless amount of commercial content, all competing for the attention of the same audiences. These sought-after people search online for information or ideas using specific questions or phrases. For supply to meet demand, we as marketers and communicators need to understand what content our target audiences are interested in — and how they search for it.
Sometimes the enthusiasm for creating content outpaces the skill behind it. Organisations try to boost visibility and search rankings by constantly producing new content optimised for the same important keywords. Surprisingly often, web content is also produced without any SEO and GEO thinking at all.
If that's how things work at your organisation, don't be surprised when your content doesn't show up in search engines and doesn't deliver results. Content costs money to produce, so it should also generate measurable outcomes: new contacts, prospects and customers, as well as stronger engagement from existing ones.
Search engine algorithms and generative AI aim to serve their users better and better. They're learning to understand what kind of content is being looked for at any given moment. Good search visibility requires that your website's content is grouped into logical, value-adding clusters.
When you build a comprehensive content cluster – a pillar page – around a broad theme your audience cares about, and link it to supporting content that goes deeper, search engines and generative AI can serve information-seekers better using your content.
Pillar page-based website architecture also simplifies content planning. Less can be more – there's no point producing new content constantly for themes that rarely change. Once the foundation is solid, you can direct your resources toward maintaining evergreen content clusters and producing timely content.
A pillar page is like a table of contents for a big topic your audience is interested in – it includes introductions to the different angles that shed more light on the subject. From these introductions, visitors can follow links to read more in a blog post or on a dedicated content page. Equally, a more detailed blog post can link back to the pillar page, where readers can find their way to other related content.
This kind of content cluster improves search visibility more effectively than targeting individual keywords. A well-structured pillar page table of contents anticipates the likely questions of your target audience – serving the interests of both the information-seeker and the provider.
Start with a theme your audience consistently searches for. Test your theme:
Next, brainstorm the most common questions related to the theme — the ones your audience is likely to ask along their buying journey. Generative AI can be a useful thinking partner here, and keyword analysis will show you what people are actually searching for. Test whether the questions could work as content pieces, then build the first version of your pillar page and fill it in with content you don't yet have.
If you've already done good work building a pillar page and related articles or other content, don't let that pillar page gather dust for too long. It's true that it serves your audiences 24/7. It's also true that information goes out of date – and new information keeps coming. So what to do?