Guide to Creating Pillar Pages for High Volume Keyword Ranking

One of the most important concepts that have evolved with SEO is topic clusters.

It’s a content creation strategy where the main focus is the topic of a post rather than keywords. You can produce different blog posts and articles around a topic that interests you or one that is related to your brand.

This concept also requires that you create pillar pages to enable you to compete for high volume keywords.

Creating pillar pages will require higher investments in time and money than that of regular blog posts. However, the rewards are immense and worth all the investments put into creating them. The reason for this post is to provide a helpful guidance for creating pillar pages for your site.

Let’s get started with a basic intro on the concept of pillar pages.

About Pillar Pages

Pillar pages are detailed and comprehensive long-form pages created to cover a particular topic. The goal is to offer all information about a topic to the readers.

Pillar pages also contain external links to data sources and other resources that are cited in the posts. A pillar page could be created as a standalone post, or as part of a topic cluster. Pillar pages differ from regular blog posts in a number of ways:

• The word length of a pillar page is much longer than that of a blog post
• A pillar page usually contains multiple sections with each covering a sub-topic
• Contents in a pillar page cover a single topic extensively.

There are, of course, other features of pillar pages but these would suffice for the moment. Pillar pages also offer great benefits to your site in terms of SEO as you will find in the next section of this guide.

Why Pillar Pages Are Important to Your SEO

Beyond offering detailed information about particular topics, pillar pages help boost your SEO.

Here are my top reasons for using pillar pages to boost your SEO.

I – Pillar pages enable you to rank higher for highly competitive keywords

Since pillar pages are long-form posts that cover particular topics in much detail, they usually contain related keywords. This helps to increase the topic relevance leading to a much higher search engine ranking.

Due to the fact that they offer extensive coverage of the topics, websites are very likely to link back to them. Also, pillar pages are likely to get lots of mentions and shares on social media networks.

These are some of the activities that help build your trust level resulting in higher Google search ranking.

II – Pillar pages provide highly optimized contents for humans and search engines

If there’s one thing that search users look out for, it is a post or article that fully covers a topic. This makes it possible for anyone to get details about a topic from a single page.

Also, search engines appreciate detailed content by rewarding such with higher search rankings. Since pillar pages fit into the description, they are able to offer value to both humans and search engines.

III – Creating a pillar page establishes you as an expert or thought leader in your niche

Creating high-quality posts such as pillar pages can actually show that you have good knowledge of your industry. That’s because it takes proper domain expertise to create content that fully covers any topic.

11 Important SEO Ranking Factors You Should Know

Step by Step Guide to Creating Pillar Pages

Creating pillar pages might be a great task to undertake; however, this does not make it impossible to do.

Here are simple steps that you can follow for creating your own pillar page:

Step 1 – Research Topics to Write About

Pillar pages are designed to cover a topic in detail, but you have to choose what topic to write about.

If you already have a topic in mind, then this step shouldn’t take up much of your time. But if you’re yet to come up with a topic for your pillar page, then you may do some research for it.

Pillar pages are meant to compete for high volume keywords, so your search should be based on that. Long-tail keywords are great for competing for low volume keywords but not ideal for pillar pages because of the time and money invested in creating the pages.

Another thing to have in mind when choosing a topic is the relationship it has with your business. It would be ideal to go for a topic that relates to your product, service, or your brand.

Part of your research should also include your competitors and the topics they are using. This information is necessary to enable you to create a competitive edge for your pillar page.

Finally, you will need to search through existing topics of yours to find out if you have any post on your chosen pillar page topic. If you have one, then you could opt for a different topic to prevent the creation of duplicate contents.

You should now have an idea of what topic to create a pillar page around after going through these tips.

Step 2 – Topic Clusters vs. Pillar Page – Which Format to Use?

This is where you decide on which format to use in creating your content. You have the option of crafting topic clusters around your topic or creating a single pillar page.

Topic clusters is a format that allows you to create multiple posts from subtopics. So, instead of putting it all into a single page, you have different pages that cover these as sub-topics.

For instance, the introduction of your content serves as the main page which is then linked to different sub-topics acting as their own pages.

If you decide to opt for a single pillar page, then the sub-topics will be featured as sections of your page. Any reader would be able to read all the contents of the pillar page from a single web page.

Step 3 – Research Keywords That You Will Target

Having completed the first two steps, you will then need to target particular search terms or keywords. Your keyword research should be able to produce target keywords, related keywords, and long-tail keywords.

You may have the target keyword already in the main topic of the pillar page, so you just have to research the others.

Related keywords are keywords with medium search volume that are related to your target keyword. Most often, the related keywords will be featured in the headers of your sub-topics under H2 and H3 tags.

The long-tail keywords are keywords with low search volumes that are related to your target keywords. These long-tail keywords can be used to create other articles that link back to the pillar page.

Step 5 – Write the Content

This is where you settle down to write the text content for your pillar page.

Though pillar pages do not have laid-down structure to follow, you could create an outline of your own. This will serve as a guide to follow for creating headings, sub-headings, and flow of your content.

Pillar pages are long-form contents that can range from 2,500 words to 5,000+ words in length. Again, there are no rules to follow when deciding on the word length of your pillar page. You can do a Google search on different pillar pages and check out the length of some of them.

One of the things that set pillar pages apart is the amount of research that goes into creating one. This means you have put in a lot of resources into creating yours.

Also, you will need to provide links to the primary source of data and research included in your pillar page.

As you write the content, remember you have to give it your best shot because there is so much at stake. This is your opportunity to market your expertise and brand to the world, so you’ve got to give it your best.

15 Amazing Benefits of Content Marketing to Your Business

Step 6 – Include Visuals for Illustration

Visuals are great for explaining your ideas and points to your readers. You may include any of the videos, podcasts, images, infographics, charts, and images to help drive home your point.

Remember also to optimize the visuals in order for them not to reduce the load speed of your pillar page. You also need to include the alt tags to optimize the images and infographics for SEO.

Step 7 – Optimize Your Pillar Page

Now that you’ve got everything in place, this is the best time to optimize your pillar page. The first thing you have to consider is the structure of the page and how the content flows.

Since this is a pillar page, you may want to structure it differently from the other pages on your site. Or you could decide to maintain the same flow with the other pages on your site. Whatever choice you make will have little or no bearing on how the page turns out, so do not let that bother you.

I would say that you format your pillar page a little different from the other pages to make it stand out from the rest.

The reason for creating the pillar page is so that you can provide a comprehensive piece of content for a particular topic. This means the content of the page has to flow logically from start to finish in that direction.

The loading speed of your page is of utmost importance if you want to have a greater number of people reading it. So make sure that the visuals or any other elements do not add to the time it takes to load in the browser.

Also, it is important that your page is mobile optimized, so mobile users are not prevented from viewing the page.

It’s a fact that most of your readers will skim through your content without actually reading through. So you have to include sub-headings, lots of links, and bolded words in your content.

This will make it possible for people to easily skim through your content and yet understand what it’s all about. Once you are done with the page optimization, you can click on the Publish button to take your content live.

Step 8 – Promote Your Pillar Page

The first few hours after you publish the page is very essential because that is when you begin to promote it. No matter how well-written your content is, if you don’t promote it, you may not get the needed audience.

Promoting your Content through Different Online Media

The moment you publish the post, Google will be notified and within the next few hours, the page will be indexed. You also need to make your pillar page more visible by linking your home page and other pages to it.

You can also include related posts on the page; add a link of the pillar page to your main menu, sidebars, and footer. Social media platforms are also great for promoting your content to your connections and followers.

And if you have links to other websites on your pillar page, you may want to reach out to the websites and notify them. It’s one of the best ways of getting backlinks from those websites.

Step 9 – Track the Performance of Your Pillar Page

Now that your pillar page is out in the open, you ought to know how it’s doing. You will have to track and monitor the page based on metrics such as page views, bounce rate, and email sign-ups.

Google Analytics will provide you with these details and many more to help you find out if indeed the ROI from the pillar page is worth it.

From the reports that you get, you will find out if you need to promote it more or build backlinks to the pillar page.

Conclusion

Pillar pages are the ideal content assets to use in competing for high volume keywords. Pillar pages are long-form contents that offer extensive coverage of any topics of your choice. Creating pillar pages requires much more investment than regular posts and that’s why they have to be properly planned.

This guide offers insights about pillar pages and basic steps to follow in creating your own pillar pages.

Are you intending to start an ideal online business? All you have to do is simply check out Wealthy Affiliate Certification Courses today and get rolling in minutes. There are more than a hundred affiliate marketing certification courses to take with lots of practicable tasks to complete towards setting up your own business.