Optimized content is one of the most significant elements for performing effectively on search engines like Google and Bing.
If your website doesn’t have quality content, it will be challenging to get the top slot effectively as opposed to that of your competitors.
Holding a robust content approach in place is fundamental – one step to ensure that you’re running the right breadth and depth of pages is by the use of Internal Links and cornerstone pages.
This article will help you inform you about cornerstone content, what it is, and how you can create it for your website.
What Is Cornerstone Content?
Cornerstone content aka pillar pages are the evergreen and most valuable articles on your website.
These sorts of pages are usually in-depth (2,000+ words) articles and present as detailed guides on a particular subject that can answer many of the queries a user might have when viewing your cornerstone pages.
Good cornerstone content is normally in the form of an article or a blog, but it can also be in the form of a webpage, PowerPoint presentation, picture, visual, audio clip, different sorts of media, or other online texts.
It normally belongs somewhere on your website and is normally a relevant section of the design, page layout and design flow.
Why Is Cornerstone Content Necessary For SEO?
Cornerstone articles improve your website position beyond doubt in search engines. If you want to get the highest rankings for your website, you should be one of the best websites for your industry.
Google and other search engines normally place websites on top of their search listings using the number of related articles that a specific website has composed in a particular topic or niche.
If you are not achieving a high rank for your business’ search terms, the search engine algorithm may be considering the relevance of your website to those search questions in support of websites with more extensive content.
Search engines not only recognize the keywords you type but also observe relevance to your users, your business, and your authority in the domain.
By possessing a broad range of content in a particular topic batch, you can demonstrate to search engines that you’re an authority in your niche, and it will improve your website rank dramatically.
Cornerstone content pages help with this because it’s centred on giving readers a thorough guide on a specific topic. It further encourages visitors and search engines to other relevant articles in your business, proving that your website gives both breadth and depth in a particular subject cluster.
Following are some of the other advantages of having cornerstone pages:
- Builds your website as an expert in your business
- Helps to create natural backlinks as a thorough guide
- Given authority to other relevant articles in your subject cluster, enabling them to place high more effectively in the search engine results
- Ensures that you’re picking the best and relevant content for your content cluster
Internal Linking Approach For Cornerstone Content
As you build and distinguish your cornerstone content, you need to optimize your internal linking structure by ensuring that your related articles link back to that cornerstone content and vice versa. This helps to equally share the SEO purpose beyond your website pages, enabling them to rank efficiently.
To do internal linking, you need to ensure that the target keyword for your web pages is used in the anchor text, to the top of your article pages, for the most benefit.
Knowing Your Website’s Cornerstone Content
So how do you recognise your website’s cornerstone content? Analyze the best pages you’d want users to see when they first appear on your website. These pages can serve as the starting point for your website.
What are the most compelling articles to you? The ones that are the most accurate, in-depth and reliable? Are these the pages targeting keywords you need to rank for the most? Do these pages support everything an internet visitor might want to understand about a furnished topic?
The pages that come to the orbit of the above factors are what you would acknowledge being your cornerstone content.
Now we are going to let you know how to produce cornerstone content.
Target The Relevant Keywords
Initially, you need to ensure that you’re putting the relevant keywords.
Most cornerstone content (or pillar pages) intend to target high volume, short-tail keywords that attract educational search purposes about a given topic/niche.
You can classify your target keywords employing a keyword research tool like Keysearch, or SEMRush, to know which phrases have search volume that you need your website to rank for.
Select Your Topic Cluster
Now, you need to know your topic cluster. What material do you want your website to give information for?
For instance, if you have a mortgage site, a topic cluster would be “first-time house purchasers” or “refinance” content.
From where you can limit it to particular sections that you can target inside every topic cluster. Then for “first-time house purchasers”, you can generate a “first-time house purchaser’s guide” or for “refinance”, you can produce a “how to refinance your house” guide as well.
Generate Longform and In-depth Content ( Ideally 2000+ Words)
Once you’ve chosen your topic cluster/section, now it’s time to write in-depth and long-form articles and blogs.
All you need to do is to ensure that your content is detail oriented and long (approximately 2500+ words). A good example is to view your rivals’ cornerstone content in the search results.
Is your webpage better and more educational than theirs is?
You can either write new content or renew old articles for SEO that can meet the goal of cornerstone content for your website.
Insert Internal Links to Your relevant Blogs/Articles
After drafting your long-form content, you should insert internal links to and from your relevant blogs inside that topic cluster.
You need to make sure your anchor text is optimized for your target keywords and that all blogs interlink with one another to serve the SEO value. This will guarantee your cornerstone content ranks high on SERPs, and that your relevant posts also rank well.
Provide More Information to Your Topic Cluster
After interlinking, you need to take a final look at your cornerstone content. What possibilities are there to generate more relevant content that you can interlink within your topic cluster?
Write down those possibilities and combine them into your content calendar to further provide more information to your topic cluster.
This will help increase your website’s relevance to search engines that topic space, and enable you to get ranked for more long-tail keywords on topics that turn out your cornerstone content.