In the physical sense, pillars are what keeps structures from coming down. They’re an essential aspect in order to maintain structure and balance. This is no different for your content strategy on YouTube or Inbound Marketing.
Pillar pages are very similar. A content pillar or also known as a pillar page, is an informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into sectors.
What are Pillar Pages?
Pillar pages put simply are web pages that cover a broad topic in detail. However, with many topics there is an abundance of information that can be included, sometimes making it difficult for a writer to effectively address their message. This is where pillar pages come in handy.
Subtopics within a pillar page are hyperlinked to separate pages that dive deeper into the subsections content. All these underlying blogs or articles are called topic clusters.
This might make it a bit easier to understand. Now as you can see all these links are different colours representing different subtopics. However they all hold the same colour at its core representing the pillar page topic whilst individually holding their own value of information, represented by the shapes (topic clusters).
What Makes a Good Pillar Page?
As discussed, pillar pages are used to inform, so in order to make sure your pillar page is effective you need to make sure you have appropriately answered the question your blog is addressing.
When using this strategy it is often that there can be a lot of content to go through. Due to this, you want to allow the reader to be able to navigate the blog efficiently so that they don’t get bored or distracted. This can be done through chapter links.
Why are Pillar Pages Important?
As technology evolves, search engines are required to adapt to search queries. Technological advancements over time have led to SEO’s to become more detailed and direct. This is a result of engines such as Google, attempting to become more human-friendly and focus on the human experience.
As you can see in the data displayed, search queries have become more detailed and descriptive. Otherwise known as Long-Tail Keywords. This is because people want answers to their exact questions. Google now has more access to online data than ever before. The exact same applies to YouTube search as well.
Due to this change, pillar pages have allowed blogs to answer or inform you as a reader in a more direct and sharper approach while still providing the proper context and information needed for people that might need more or less of an outline on a particular topic.
Understanding Your Readers Intent
It is essential to keep focus based around your users when writing a blog involving pillar pages. Your ability to not only capture your reader but serve as useful to them lies upon your ability to understand what their intentions are for reading your blog.
The main objective is to bring the reader as close to their goal or answer as possible. To do this you must have a sound understanding about the questions people are asking. A good tool for this is ‘Answer The Public’. This website allows creators to see what people are searching for when it comes to topics.
Example of Pillar Pages Done Right.
Hubspot allows readers to efficiently navigate through their blogs while maintaining a consistent level of thoroughness and detail to the topic through the use of pillar pages.
They also allow their readers to download the pillar pages as they understand that these pages can be quite extensive and are not always able to be fully comprehended or read in one sitting.
HubSpots use of chapter links are also another implementation that allows users to jump through their pillar pages and find exactly what they are looking for through hyperlinked lists such as this.
In the end, the application of Pillar Content has seen extensive success for the overall traffic within a website and its individual blogs. It allows readers to jump from either exactly what they need to a detailed blog about the overall topic.
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