Why Content Pillars Are Essential for Building Brand Awareness

What are content pillars?

Content pillars are comprehensive pieces of relevant content on a topic or theme that can be broken up into smaller sections and categories. Examples of content pillars include pages on a website, e-books, and long-form blogs. Content pillars may also be used to generate social media content by focusing on a particular theme.

When starting a blog, for instance, you can focus on a broad topic. For example, a pet blogger might have a content pillar blog post for dog food, treats, toys, and so forth. These larger pieces of content can then be turned into smaller pieces, like infographics and videos on all your marketing channels, including your website, social media platforms, and blog.

Content pillars also support your SEO efforts by providing you with a better internal linking structure that links your pillar page to various other pages on your website.

When you add a blog to your website, you have a lot of content, but how are those pieces connected? A content pillar page is a hub for your content, with all subtopics being secondary pages that link back to your pillar page. These interconnected pages are sometimes called clusters because they’re all linked by the same specific themes or topics.

There are also social media content pillars that function in a similar way. However, instead of creating long-form content about a specific topic or theme, you'll develop topics to center your social media marketing strategy. For instance, your social media strategy can consist of different types of content like blogs, videos, and photos that all revolve around the same theme.

Types of pillar content

You can use several content pillars to attract website visitors and provide them with a comprehensive overview of a topic. Remember, content pillar examples include everything from blogs to white papers, so there’s no limit on the type of content you can use to enhance your search engine optimization efforts.

When you write content for your business, consider using the following types of pillar content to engage visitors:

Guide pillars

Guide content pillars are typically evergreen, meaning optimized content stays relevant regardless of industry trends or recent events. Content pillar examples of evergreen content include information people will always want to know, like the best plants for summer or a guide for first-time pet owners. This information stays relevant and acts as the encyclopedia for the chosen topic.

Then, the cluster—or interlinking— content pages can focus on in-depth aspects of the content pillars. For example, if you have a guide about caring for a puppy, you can write a secondary article focusing on a topic covered in the pillar content, like housetraining tips, the best walking gear, and choosing dog food.

What is pillars

The "What is" pillar page describes and explains a topic in depth. This pillar content can help you rank for a specific target keyword about a broader topic because you’re providing more in-depth information. For example, if someone wants to know what evergreen content is, you could offer an in-depth page about it on your blog.

How-to pillars

How-to content pillars describe a topic in-depth and explain how to do something. For instance, you can teach your visitors how to housetrain a puppy, plant seeds, and anything else someone might want to know. How-to pillars are tutorials that cover a broad topic but carefully walk the reader through the steps to accomplish a task.

What are the benefits of content pillars?

Content pillars provide an overarching theme for the rest of your content clusters, allowing you to take a broad topic and narrow it down into other relevant pages and posts. You can even use content pillars with curated content on your social media profiles to beef up your organic strategy.

A few of the most significant advantages of content pillars include the following:

Increased website traffic

Pillar content is always relevant, so it can increase brand awareness and website traffic over time and continue attracting traffic months or years later. This type of content differs from other kinds focusing on news, trends, or a specific time period since it’s something people will still want to read in the future.

Higher search rankings

Google tends to prefer longer-form content to help it understand your web pages. Additionally, search engines like Google care about the user experience, and creating content pillars shows that you’re a comprehensive source of information. Finally, optimizing your content using target keywords can increase your rankings on search engines to drive even more website visitors.

Authority

If you want customers to trust your brand, you must give them a reason. Pillar content is highly educational and valuable to users, so it helps you establish authority on topics your audience cares about. This can help you build brand trust, resulting in users visiting your website for more information about a topic.

In addition, attracting visitors looking for comprehensive information on a specific topic can help you build a natural backlink profile because other publishers will want to link back to your pillar content.

Developing a content pillar strategy

Pillar content is a crucial aspect of any content strategy and can improve your SEO efforts while giving you a comprehensive topic to write about and break into smaller clusters, so you’ll never run out of ideas. Before you begin, you should have a pillar content strategy.

Here’s how you can develop one:

Learn about the topics your audience wants

This part may be easy, depending on your business or brand. For instance, if you sell pet products, your audience probably wants to learn more about pet topics. Most bloggers have a niche like fitness, health, pets, family, children, food, and so forth. As such, it’s worth taking a deep dive into the most important topics for your customers.

Identify content pillar topic and subtopics

Every content pillar needs clusters of content that link back to it and provide users with even more in-depth information. Content pillars should be interesting, relevant to your target audience, and have ranking potential.

Review existing content

You should already have existing content on your website you can use as the basis for your content pillars. By auditing your existing content, you can determine which pages can be turned into more extensive pillar content or remain as cluster pages.

Perform keyword research

Once you’ve identified topics you want to write about, you should perform keyword research to determine search volume and find related keywords you can try to rank for.

Create pillar content

With your main topics and clusters, you can begin creating your pillar and cluster content. You can look at the competition to learn how they structure their content. Make sure your pillar content is user-friendly and easily digestible.

Link your pages

Once your pillar content and clusters are complete, you can interlink them with one another to improve your internal linking structure and the user experience. There are several ways you can do this. For instance, if you have a blog, you can add pillar and cluster pages to your menu. You can also streamline your navigation by adding the pillar content to the menu.

Tips for creating pillar content

Creating content pillars takes time, but increasing your rankings on search is well worth it. With the right tools and resources, you can make educational, valuable, and informative content to attract new customers and help them trust your brand.

Here are a few tips for creating effective pillar content:

• Don’t forget keyword research. Keyword research is essential to any content strategy because you want your content to be crawled and indexed by search engines so users can find it online. In addition, keyword research can provide valuable information, such as search volume and difficulty, helping you choose the right keywords to target and rank faster.
• Understand your audience. Every business has a particular target audience. For example, if you sell pet products, your target audience may be new pet parents. Meanwhile, if you sell coffee, your target audience could be anyone. Understanding who you’re creating content for can help you determine which type of pillar content to make, preventing you from building content that won’t perform well.
• Always distribute. It’s not enough to use keywords throughout your content and hope it will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). If you want your pillar content to shine, distribute it on your brand's social media channels and to email marketing subscribers. Promoting your content will bring more visitors to it, which can increase engagement.

Grow your brand with content pillars

Content pillars are comprehensive pieces of content that inform, educate, and provide real value to website visitors. Your pillar content should offer in-depth information about a topic and establish your brand as an authority on the subject.

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